


let not time deceive you (you cannot conquer time)

by Draco_sollicitus



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, But There Will Be a Lot of Angst First, Canon Typical Violence, College Professor Joe, Eventual Smut, Guilt, Heavy Criticism of the modern Catholic Church, Identity Porn, Immortal!Joe, M/M, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Minor Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Modern!Nicky, PhD Candidate Nicky, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:56:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 85,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draco_sollicitus/pseuds/Draco_sollicitus
Summary: Nicolo Genova, or Nicky to his American friends, is just trying to get through his PhD program. He's writing his dissertation on Post-classical homoerotic poetry, but hecannotfind anyone who speaks an extinct dialect of Arabic so he can translate a famed love poem by a little known poet, al-Kaysani.Strangely enough, his friend knows a professor on campus whocantranslate the poem. What starts as a simple request for assistance on his dissertation blossoms into something that Nicky -- shy, reserved Nicky who abandoned his plans for the priesthood months before ordination -- had never imagined for himself: true love.What he doesn't know is that Dr. Joseph Jones (his handsome, erudite, kind, lovely Joe) is harboring a secret too large for anyone to believe -- and that secret might just cost them everything.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 2505
Kudos: 2855





	1. Meetings

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO!
> 
> I've done fluffy JoeNicky, angsty JoeNicky, torture hurt/comfort JoeNicky, love languages, JoeNicky ...
> 
> And, that only brings me to the natural conclusion of: Modern!Nicky, Immortal!Joe. (Watch me screaming into a pillow because broke, millennial Nicky is bizarrely difficult to write while maintaining recognizable elements of canon Nicky!)
> 
> For the purposes of this fic, Nile became immortal prior to 2019, and is comfortably part of the team/family. Joe and Nile are living and studying on a college campus in Washington D.C., at the same university where Nicky is earning his PhD in Literature. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't speak Italian or Arabic, and the dialect of Arabic that I picked for the "lost love poem" seemed appropriately unused and unusual, but I could be very wrong!
> 
> Please check all chapter notes for relevant **warnings** (there's one below!)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One year prior to a fateful event that will change everything, Nicky and Joe meet over a poem that needs to be translated

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **WARNING**  
>  Massive angst/time jump at the start of the fic.  
> Implied references to violence  
> Joe in the middle of a panic attack  
> Potential **major character death**  
>  (PLEASE note that there are no major tags in the overall warnings for the story -- and we do NOT see a body, we only see the fallout from an event that happens off-screen)

“I have to go back.”

“Yusuf.”

Louder now, cracking in the middle: “I have to go back!”

Nile shoots a look at Booker in the rearview mirror. _Calm him down,_ Booker says with his eyes. After almost thirty years, she’s getting used to Booker’s expressions, learning them like a second (or third or fourth) language.

“Yusuf, come on.” A hand on his arm now, but Joe flinches away and tugs on the door handle desperately. 

Thank god for child locks.

“H-he-” Joe’s shaking, and Nile surges over the buckles and the seat dividers to wrap her arms around Joe.

“Yusuf, please.” She talks fiercely over his broken sobs. “You can’t help him.”

“N-n-n-”

Apparently, immortals can still hyperventilate. She would have been happier _not_ knowing this.

“You can’t help him,” Nile repeats, softer this time. Her own heart is wounded, after all. “We can’t go back, the area’s probably _crawling_ with those assholes by now.”

“The kid’s right,” Booker says gruffly. His eyes are worrisomely on the rearview mirror again as he takes a sharp left turn down the bumpy Virginian road -- it’s pitch black, no streetlights, no headlights. “Joe, you need to breathe.”

“H-he could be-”

“I’m sorry, Yusuf.” Nile fights back tears. “He’s gone, I’m so sorry-”

“We have to go back for him.” A hand scrabbles at the door again, and Nile grips his wrist in a way that would bruise anyone but them. She pulls his arm in until it's cradled to his chest, holds him tighter. “W-we-”

Nile feels one tear escape. “He knew what he was doing, Yusuf - we can’t … we have to honor his sacrifice. He saved you.”

“ _Saved_ me.” Joe laughs, and it’s a mangled, twisted thing. Nothing like his usual bright cheeriness. It fades quickly into ragged sobs, and he shakes his head, sagging against Nile, his fingers curled into a fist against his chest. “W-w-we need to bury him.”

“Joe,” Booker says. His voice is more gentle than Nile’s ever heard it. “Joey, come on.”

“We left him!” Joe shouts. “We left him there, and there’s no one!” Nile tucks her face into Joe’s shoulder because she can’t bear to look at his face as he screams in his agony. “His family is _gone,_ Sebastien, and - and I just left him there.” He collapses again, a puppet with slashed strings. “I left him.”

Nile tries one more time. “Yusuf, he was my friend too, but-”

She’s cut off by another garbled laugh, but Joe doesn’t sound angry now: just sad. Exhausted. Slightly broken.

“ _Friend,”_ he repeats, shaking his head and leaning into her side. “He’s … he is all. And more. And now…”

He trails off, his chest shaking with building sobs, and the unspoken words hang heavy in the dark car.

_And now he’s dead._

* * *

_One Year Earlier_

Nicky doesn’t know how many times he’s died since he started this.

His head is pounding, and his eyes feel like they’ve been stuffed with sand, and through it all, he has this endless, remorseless voice in his head telling him to just fucking quit already. Surrendering to the almighty pain in his head, Nicky sinks into the ancient cushion beneath him and groans out of his chest, a paroxysm of agony.

“How many pages, Nicky?”

_Oh, it is an angel, come to bring merciful judgement upon him._

A finger prods him behind the ear, and he moans again.

_Merciless judgement._

“How many pages, Genova?”

“Six,” he mumbles. “Six pages.”

Another poke to the ear; he twitches and swats it away before fully burying his face out of sight.

“You had seven pages this morning!” _Poke poke._

“That was this morning.” Nicky’s voice is muffled by paper. “Now, as you can see, I am in Hell.”

“How many new pages did you tell your advisor you’d have by your meeting tomorrow?”

“Hell,” Nicky repeats. “I am in Hell.” He can sense the next poke coming before it happens, so he answers while attempting to fend it off. “Twenty pages.” 

He flaps his hand without much gusto as River continues her assault for a few more seconds.

“Twenty pages!” River cackles and drops into the abandoned chair next to him in his crammed little cubicle. “Jesus, Nicky. Do you have a death wish?”

He grunts.

River taps the pile of essays with fresh green ink (and some mild coffee stains) on them. “Tell me you didn’t stay up all night grading the freshmen.”

“...I didn’t stay up all night grading the freshmen.” He got an hour of sleep. So it wasn’t _all_ night. Ha _ha._ Ugh.

She picks up the abandoned mug near his monitor and sniffs it dramatically. “Oh, _Nicky._ Tell me this isn’t a shot of Five Hour Energy mixed with day-old espresso.”

He finds it harder to lie about that. 

“Nicky.” She sets the mug down and tugs on his arm; Nicky moans and wishes for death again. “Nicolo Genova! An Italian should know better!”

“If you have come to kill me, River, I ask that you do it now.” Nicky nuzzles back into the seam of the open book under his head. “So that I may take a nap after.”

River giggles and pokes him one last time before shoving his rolly chair out of the way so she can situate herself in front of his laptop. Nicky’s too tired to grunt in protest as he’s shoved sideways, merely rolling with the chair, his large feet dragging across the shitty stained carpet in his tiny office.

“You just wrote _this said something in Arabic_ over and over again … twenty … no, twenty-three times,” River counts quickly. “Nicky, your footnote says _learn Arabic, asshole_. You better delete that before your advisor sees!”

“Maybe that was a note from my advisor.”

“Nope. Not even Andrew is that much of a dick.” River hums and cracks her fingers loudly; Nicky winces and pretends he can’t _see_ the noise of it ricocheting around his sore head. “Maybe. He’s probably not that much of a dick.”

“Did you come here to help me or give me a panic attack?” Nicky asks, rolling his tongue around his teeth. Ugh. He tastes like diner coffee and yesterday’s half-eaten sandwich. He needs water. Or more coffee.

_Or vodka._

“Definitely came here to help,” River promises. “I know a guy who can help you with this poem.”

That gets his interest. 

Nicky lifts his head from his abandoned collection of Laudomia Forteguerri’s poems and opens bleary eyes to stare at River with renewed hope, feeling like the sun has peeked through at last through dismal clouds of despair and reduced graduate funding.

His mouth still tastes like ass, though.

“Oh?” Nicky blinks, confused, wondering if in his exhaustion, he hallucinated her comment. 

“I know someone who speaks Arabic,” River says, strangely nonchalant in her expression.

“I know people who speak Arabic too, River,” Nicky points out flatly, not wanting to be rude, but not knowing how to be less blunt in English. “But they do not speak a random dialect that went extinct almost a thousand years ago.”

“This person does.” If he didn’t know better, Nicky would say River looks _amused._

“They know … Siculo-Arabic?” Nicky repeats. He’s definitely hallucinating. River just nods. “...not Maltese, right? Because I found someone who spoke Maltese but couldn’t translate this.” River shakes her head. “But actual … Siculo-Arabic?”

“Yep.” She pops the ‘p’ with intense enthusiasm.

“It went extinct after 1300,” Nicky says. There’s a bit of dried drool on the corner of his mouth, and he uses the long sleeve of his sweater, pulled over his hands, to paw at it until he doesn’t feel it anymore. “It -- no one alive should speak it.”

“And yet.” River grins. “I asked around, okay?” She rubs his arm affectionately. “I got tired of watching you mutter to yourself in the blue light from across the hall.”

Nicky thinks he might cry. Or vomit. The second one’s from the lack of sleep, though.

“Who is this magical person?” Nicky breathes, eyes wide. Hell, even if River got it a little wrong and the person speaks some different dialect of Arabic, some modern version that, again, wasn’t wiped out by the Aragonese when they invaded Sicily, he’ll at least see if they can help him parse out another verse.

Any verse. Even a fucking cognate of one more word.

Anything to get him to more than _six_ pages in his dissertation so he doesn’t get _murdered_ by Dr. Andrews tomorrow.

(Dr. Andrews would not murder him. He is a very nice, mild-mannered man in his sixties who has a little house in Georgetown and a big shaggy dog, and would definitely not murder exhausted, broke PhD candidates who were so tired they sometimes forgot they were speaking Italian in the Starbucks at DuPont Circle).

River laughs to herself and hands Nicky a flashcard that’s been ripped in half, with _Trumbull Hall, Rm #1069_ written on it in a quick scrawl.

 _J Jones_ is written right below it.

“Jones?” Nicky repeats. Then he frowns. “Trumbull? That’s the Art building, River--”

“Artists can’t speak Sicklo-Arabic?” River asks, an eyebrow perfectly arched. 

“Siculo,” Nicky mutters, mostly to himself. His thumb strokes over the written words. He feels weird, like a buzzing in the back of his skull that wasn’t there before.

Must be the caffeine. And sleep deprivation. _When was the last time he went home?_

“Jones is great,” River promises. “You’ll get along famously.”

“Huh.” Nicky rubs his jaw and blinks again. He turns and gives River a quizzical frown. “Is this a ploy to get me to walk across campus? Because I swear, I have been outside in the last 24 hours.”

“What day is it?”

“Tues--” He catches her expression shift. “Wednesday!” He holds the flashcard aloft as his trophy. “Because my meeting with Andrews is Thursday, and that’s tomorrow!”

“And you only have six pages,” River reminds him, far too cheerfully. 

Nicky is not proud of the noise he makes.

“Go see Jones.” River pats him on the back, but that quickly becomes repeated taps to his shoulder blades, _pat pat pat pat pat_ until he finds himself scooting up and off his chair. Her feet claim his seat immediately, and she beams up at him, incandescent and chipper and fresh-faced as always. “Go go go!”

“Ugh.” Nicky saves his progress (all sixty-five words of it), closes his poetry book, tucks it into his satchel with all his pens, almost grabs the essays, leaves them on the desk because _fuck those essays,_ and then slings his bag over his shoulder. “Jones,” he repeats, rubbing the crick in his neck. “I’m going to see …”

“Dr. Jones,” River repeats. She cracks open his mini-fridge and ooo’s in excitement. 

“Don’t touch my yogurt-” Nicky warns.

She’s already pulling out the Yoplait. “Come back at 5 PM with at least three more pages, and I’ll buy you new yogurt,” she promises. “Chobani, even.”

“You are a thief,” Nicky says, weary to the bone. He tilts his head. “Chobani … Flippys?”

“Flips,” River corrects serenely, pulling a spoon out of her backpack. “And yep. After you see Jones.”

“Jones,” Nicky repeats. “Alright.”

“ _You’ll both thank me later,_ ” she mutters when he has his back turned.

“What?” Nicky turns back at the exit to his cubicle, but River’s already happily consuming her yogurt.

“Huh?” She repeats back at him, guileless and unbearably cute.

“Bleh,” Nicky shakes his head, chalks it up to more sleep deprivation, and slumps his way to the exit of the grad student offices.

He probably should have brought some kind of jacket, but he only owns the one, and it’s at his apartment which he always forgets to go home to. It’s beginning to rain, in that pathetic DC-in-early-November kind of way, and Nicky shivers miserably as he walks across campus. The sky is unbearably grey for ten in the morning, and he wishes he had an umbrella, even though it wouldn’t do much good.

The air is full of drizzle, and the sidewalk smells like rusted earth under the water that soaks through the shoulders of his sweater and dampens the cuffs of his scruffed-up jeans -- it’s not raining enough to threaten his laptop or work, so he doesn’t feel the need to start sprinting like some people around him.

Trumbull is only a ten minute walk from the grad offices, and Nicky finds himself squinting at the campus maps that are posted along his route twice to double-check where he’s going.

He never has much reason to go anywhere but Austen Hall and the grad offices, so he’s very pleased with himself when he sees the sign for Trumbull and jogs up the damp steps to the clear doors that promise warmth and dryness to his aching body.

There are art installations hanging from the ceiling, fabulous things that look like wisps of smoke; it draws his attention, which means he nearly body-slams into a man coming out of Trumbull.

“Scusi, mi scusi,” Nicky says hastily, nearly taking himself out in his attempt to not collide with the stranger.

“Non si preoccupi,” the man answers with a pleasantly strange accent forming the familiar words. Nicky blinks rainwater out of his eyelashes and realizes the guy he almost knocked over is …

Hot. Really hot. 

Blonde, muscle-y, with pretty eyes. 

“Uh,” Nicky coughs, and the man holds the door open for him with a faint smile.

His eyes are sad, Nicky realizes upon closer inspection. It makes him overcome his initial anxiety and smile back.

“Grazie,” he murmurs, nodding his head.

“Prego, prego,” the man answers, and he lets the door close behind Nicky as he scoots his dripping body over the threshold.

He turns and watches the man stroll away in the rain, his face tilted back to feel the raindrops; everyone around him rushes to and fro on the sidewalk, trying to get out of the rain, boots clacking against pavement --

He simply stands, watching the rain fall around him. He’s alone on the sidewalk, no bag, no hat, no real jacket behind the suede outer layer that looks like it’s taken its fair share of beatings. 

The man looks impossibly lonely; and for some reason, that makes Nicky sad too.

As he climbs the stairs to follow the signs to _1050-1074,_ he realizes it’s because Nicky is lonely -- and he doesn’t wish that feeling on anyone.

He’s lost in his thoughts, his head muddled and stuffed with exhaustion and empty anxiety about his looming deadline, so he misses 1069 and has to double back from the end of the hall. Now, he notices some lovely still lifes on the walls of the corridor, and a few interesting sculptures that resemble spiders that rise up from the corner of one door. 

_J Jones_ is on the door of 1069, and Nicky feels that weird buzzing in his head again, like pent-up pressure at the base of his skull, vibrating with more and more intensity that swirls through his system to take up residence in his stomach.

He tilts his head and whacks at his ear with the flat of his palm, trying to shake it off. When it doesn’t go away, Nicky comes to the conclusion that his doctor was right. He probably needs to take Vitamin B supplements. 

His sweater sleeves still pulled over his knuckles, Nicky lifts his hand and raps three times on the office door.

“Come in,” answers a pleasant male voice. Nicky tries to place the accent -- _Dutch, maybe?_ \-- before pushing the door open.

And, clearly, the universe is trying to make him feel better after the last three shitty Grindr dates he’s been on because not _only_ did he literally run into a very hot man at the entrance to the building, but …

Dr. Jones is probably the Most Beautiful Man he’s ever seen.

“Uh,” his mouth feels fuzzy. _Why don’t I come to the Art Building more often?_ He wonders to himself, eyes wide but heavy with missed sleep. 

Thank God he’s so tired that his mouth doesn’t physically form those words.

“Hello.” The man stands from his desk and gestures at the seat in front of him. “Come in, come in. How can I help you?”

“Uh. I … I need help,” Nicky manages to say. His entire face is on fire.

If River were here, she’d say _fuck yes, you need help. Immediate help. Where are those nice boys from Queer Eye? Karamo, please, you’re our only hope!_

Thinking about River makes him feel a little bolder, and it also reminds him to say --

“With a translation!”

Of course, he says this at the same time Dr. Jones asks, “Help with what?”

If the Guiness people could do a record for most awkward tension, Nicky thinks he’d win. Any day. Maybe the floor will eat him now. Goodbye, Nicky. 

He turns his head, wondering if he should just run for it now, but his eye catches on a beautiful charcoal sketch that’s hanging on the wall. He takes a step towards it, frowning, catching the expressive sweep of a woman’s jawbone, her hair thick and dark where it falls to her shoulders.

“That’s … that’s very good,” Nicky says softly, his fingers gripping the strap of his bag.

“There’s art in this office worth millions of dollars, and that’s the one you see?” Dr. Jones asks, but he doesn’t sound rude about it. Quite the opposite.

Nicky struggles with other languages and their connotation sometimes, but he does know _tone_ very well -- the man sounds … wondering.

He glances around the office quickly; he sees a beautiful vase that’s probably worth more money than he will _ever_ make in his sad, exhausted, English-studying life; there’s an oil painting on display behind the desk that looks like Van Gogh but with different colors; he also sees what _can’t be_ but probably is a faberge egg. 

Nicky shrugs and goes back to the sketch of the woman. “I like this,” he says, sleepiness making him honest and more open than normal. He tilts his head, sees the way she’s looking away from the viewer, sees the way that if he tilts his head a different way, it looks like she’s _screaming_ and not laughing --

“It makes me sad for some reason,” he says. “But I like it.”

“Why?” Dr. Jones’s voice is soft.

“Because the person who drew it loves her,” Nicky decides. _Yes, that’s it. “_ She’s loved. And she knows it.” That thought makes him smile.

There’s a sharp inhale across the office, but when Nicky tears his eyes away from the drawing of the beautiful woman -- beautiful because the artist loves her, but also beautiful objectively, she’s clearly lovely -- Dr. Jones is perfectly composed.

“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing at the empty chair. 

Nicky remembers that he feels like death warmed over sixteen-times on one of those hot-dog rolly things at 7-11, and he collapses into the chair gratefully, dropping his satchel to the floor at his feet. 

The man smiles at him, his brown eyes beautiful, expressive, gentle -- Nicky forgets to breathe for a second, and then the man clears his throat and holds his hand over the desk. 

“I’m Joe Jones,” he says in that ridiculously nice voice of his. “And you are?”

“Nicolo Genova, but people call me Nicky,” Nicky answers, some level of ingrained manners forcing him to sit forward and take the man’s hand.

The buzzing in his head becomes a screaming becomes a tsunami --

Vanishes.

There’s warmth spreading up his arm, and he sits back in his chair, blinking tiredly. He rubs his temple. _Not a migraine. Not today. Please no migraine. Let me write ten more pages and then I will have the migraine, how does that sound, god of Migraines? I will sacrifice my firstborn at the altar of Excedrin._

He does not mention to this imaginary god of Migraines that he will, in fact, not be producing a firstborn considering that he is, as River charmingly, out-datedly says, “a Kinsey Six.”

Whatever that means.

Dr. Jones has said something in the meantime, and he wishes, once more, for the ground to swallow him. It would only be polite.

“Sorry. I’ve … I’ve been awake for a while.” He laughs awkwardly and curls his hands into loose fists over his thighs, stretching his lower back a little. “Could you --”

“I said, Nicolo, what do you need translated?”

“Ah.” Nicky nods eagerly and pulls out his laptop, already talking full-speed. “So, I am writing my dissertation, and it is on queer love poetry from 1200 to 1500, give or take a decade or so,” he waves his hand around in the air demonstratively as he cracks open his ancient laptop. “And the effects on modernist homoeroetic love poetry in the western canon -- and, I have found the most perfect poem, by a little known poet, and I know it is perfect because _another_ poet referenced it in … ah, yes, in, uh, 1350 in a different account of love poetry between men, and he’s _supposed_ to be an influence on Shakespeare on his Young Male sonnets, but, uh--” he coughs and looks up from the laptop where the scanned poem resides. “It’s … it’s in Siculo-Arabic. Specifically a dialect that. Uh. No one speaks anymore?”

“I can take a look at it,” the professor (sexy professor, sexy professor, sexy professor, his brain uselessly chants in every language he knows) offers, holding a hand out.

“Grazie,” Nicky says, deflating a little as he holds out the laptop like that cartoon about lions that his mother made him watch when he was a baby. 

_Lion King. God, I forgot The Lion King._

Then, as Jones is examining the poem, a strangely amused smile on his face, something occurs to Nicky.

“You spoke in Italian?” 

Dr. Jones looks up, blinking, with a puzzled smile on his (terribly, awfully) perfect mouth. “You spoke in Italian, so I thought it was … only polite?”

“Oh.” Nicky’s face is on fire. This is the only explanation for the heat consuming his head. “Sorry. I …”

“Haven’t slept recently?” Jones fills in, more teasing now. He hums and goes back to the poem.

Nicky switches back into English, determined to not look like an ass again. “The poem is by someone named Al-Kaysani, and it’s supposed to be a … a yearning.”

“Yes,” Jones murmurs to himself, looking sad now. “Yes it was.”

“You can read it?” Nicky breathes, eyes wide.

Jones hums in assent, scrolls down the page, and doesn’t see how Nicky’s about to start crying.

“Oh thank God,” he mutters in Italian, almost crossing himself out of sheer habit. “I have to be in front of my thesis advisor tomorrow and I … I am …” he struggles to find the words in English.

“Up Shit Creek without a paddle?” Jones suggests helpfully.

Nicky frowns. “Why would I be in a creek full of shit?” He blinks, registers it as an idiom and nods. “Ah. No. Yes, that is … suitable.”

“Why aren’t you getting your PhD in Italian Literature?” Jones asks suddenly, setting the laptop down. “Why all the translations into English?”

“I moved here in 2006,” Nicky answers, shrugging. “Never made my way back to Italy after…” He trails off, red in the face again.

Dr. Jones does _not_ need to know what stopped Nicky from going back to Italy, from going back home. 

“I went into seminary,” Nicky continues. If that surprises Dr. Jones, it doesn’t show on his face. “And we studied Latin, and I spent a lot of time in translation, and thinking about what translation can do and capture and change - and … and I didn’t become a priest.” He holds his hands up as though to say _obviously_. “So, I came here to study. I like poetry.”

“Do you write it?” Dr. Jones asks. “Love poetry?”

His smile is nice; it makes his eyes crinkle warmly, and Nicky wonders if the skin would be soft there, if he swept his fingertips over the gentle wrinkles of happiness, if he let himself touch and wonder freely --

“No,” Nicky answers quickly. “I am much better at … at reading than writing.” He smiles, and it’s a little humorless. After all, you should probably _be_ in love before you _write_ about love. “I’m no poet.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Dr. Jones murmurs. There’s a painful, wonderful moment where their eyes meet, and Nicky thinks he’s _never_ seen brown eyes hold so much light, he thinks he’s never felt a person’s specific gravity before, but here he is tilting in, in, in --

Dr. Jones blinks and scratches at the corner of his thick, beautiful beard with the backs of his fingers. 

“I can translate this for you,” he says serenely. “Do you want to send me this file, and I can--”

Nicky nods quickly, hands shaking as he takes the laptop back and fires up his email account. 

“Who should I send it to?” He asks, wondering if he sounds breathy, and if he _is_ breathy, is it because Dr. Jones just single-handedly saved his ass, or is it because Dr. Jones just single-handedly ruined all men for him.

"Joseph.jones @dupont.edu” Dr. Jones supplies helpfully, and Nicky has to back-space Joseph a few times _joesph - josehp- - joseph -_ because he’s so excited.

“Thank you, Dr. Jones,” he says earnestly, holding his hand out and shaking the other man’s hand warmly many times, probably too many times.

 _You need to do the chill,_ an irate voice hisses in his brain. 

_It’s just ‘chill,’ Nicky,_ a voice that sounds more like River corrects sweetly.

“I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough,” Nicky says, remembering to let go of Dr. Jones' hand.

“You can start by calling me Joe,” Dr. Jones says with another radiant smile.

It’s like staring into the sun. 

Fuck, if the sun was that beautiful, Nicky might build a rocket to _launch_ himself into it.

 _I need to sleep,_ he remembers.

“And maybe you can buy me dinner?” That’s accompanied by a wink, flirtatious, real, and it spools through Nicky’s body, liquid-hot and endless and _oh, he’s hallucinating again, surely, and_ \--

He tugs on his earring nervously and nods. “Yes, dinner,” He hears himself saying, as though down a long hallway, and maybe through a few ventilation shafts, echoing and distant and _what are you doing, what are you doing --_

“Friday?” Joe asks, standing when Nicky does, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles from his loose linen shirt that does very little to hide how firm his body is.

 _Do you workout?_ Nicky wants to ask, delirious in his exhaustion. 

“Friday,” Nicky repeats distantly.

(Maybe that man from the front of the building knocked Nicky down the steps, and he hit his head, and now he’s bleeding out in front of Trumbull, and Dr. Joseph Jones is a beautiful amalgamation of the EMT who saved his life and the doctor who’s bringing him into surgery and the angel that God has sent to bring his soul to Heaven where it will be regrettably turned away by San Pietro due to irreconcilable differences--)

“Send me the details,” Joe says, walking Nicky to his door. “I look forward to hearing from you, Nicolo.”

Nicky, miraculously, does not trip, not even when Joe’s warm hand goes to the small of his back. 

“Right,” Nicky repeats, eyes wide, nodding more to himself than to the gorgeous, warm, real man standing next to him as he slings his bag over his shoulder again. “Goodbye, Dr. Jones-”

“Joe,” Joe corrects, another sweet smile on his glorious face.

“Joe,” Nicky repeats, smiling to himself. “Goodbye, Joe.”

“Goodbye, Nicolo.”

They smile at each other in his doorway, and then Nicky nods once more and heads to the left.

“Other way,” Joe murmurs quietly at the same time Nicky realizes the numbers of the doors are going up.

Mortified, he walks the other way, giving an awkward wave as he uses his long legs as well as he can, walking swiftly to the stairs and away from the cozy office of Dr. Jones.

The cold rain is a blessing on his face as he stumbles out of Trumbull and down the steps. Nicky turns his head to the sky and closes his eyes as he stands on the sidewalk; he thinks ridiculously of baptism, of vows broken and kept, and he lets out a deep breath he’d swallowed as he walked away from Joe Jones.

“I’m fucked,” he croaks to himself.

“Join the club,” someone says in a French accent, and he lowers his face to see The Hot Man from before, stretched out on a bench, staring apathetically at the bower of trees above him.

“Are you okay?” Nicky asks hesitantly.

“Meh.” The guy shrugs and says, “Life is a trial that we all must suffer through,” as though he were merely commenting on the weather.

“Have a nice day anyway!” Nicky says as genuinely as he can before walking away from the man.

“You too,” is almost swallowed by the sound of increasing rain.

Nicky makes it back to his apartment (he has to circle back to the grad offices because he left his keys there, of course he did) and collapses on his bed; he thinks about warm smiles and brown eyes and thick beards and lovely hands and he falls asleep feeling more calm than he has since his Xanax prescription ran out eight months ago.

When he wakes up, he rolls over to his laptop -- a ping of an email notification woke him from his doze, and he cracks open his eyes as he much as he can to see who it’s from:

_Joseph Jones --_

Nicky sits bolt upright and flings his computer open and in front of his now-crossed legs, almost flinging it off the bed in the process.

It’s the translation.

It’s the Honest to God translation of al-Kaysani’s love poem, from the late thirteenth century, translated from a barely translatable dialect that not a single person he could find had the _time or the patience_ to translate, not a Linguistics student, not students fluent in Arabic and Maltese --

It’s the translation.

“I’m going to marry that man,” Nicky croaks to no one but himself and the patter of rain against the dingy window of his tiny studio apartment. 

He pulls his laptop towards himself, scans the document fifteen times. _It’s such a lovely poem,_ he realizes, his chest aching, _I want to reach back in time and hold him --_ no one’s ever, _ever_ captured how lonely Nicky feels, not like this. It’s like he’s _talking_ to this almost non-existent poet, and to be fair, he’s the first person reading this poem (well, second really, Joe read it first) in hundreds of years, sitting here on his collapsing mattress, drumming his fingers against his leg, tears building in his eyes for a person he’ll never meet, a person lost to time.

He starts to type.

Nicky looks up, fevered, three hours later, to discover that he’s written an extra twelve pages; he sends a text to River in both celebration and relief but mainly _gratitude,_ and then remembers his deal with Dr. Jones.

Debating with himself over whether or not the professor -- as sexy, mature, and wonderfully composed as he was -- was kidding with him or not, Nicky pulls open his email, cracks his fingers a few times, and then makes himself write:

_Dr. Jones (Joe),_

_Thank you for your help; this poem feels like it’s been missing from my life since I was born, if that makes sense. It’s a beautiful poem, and I’m sure your translation made it even more beautiful. Thank you. Endlessly._

_Maybe we could talk about it at dinner on Friday? Does 7 work for you?_

_-Nicky_

He almost signs it _Nicolo_ \-- it was what Joe had called him, after all -- but he worries that he’ll sound pretentious. Everyone he’s ever met in America has made fun of his name, of the way it takes form in his mouth. And it’s not like he _likes_ how it sounds in their mouths, either.

But Joe had said it so beautifully. He seems to say everything so beautifully. 

Nicky rubs the back of his neck and groans, from deep in his stomach -- maybe he should eat something. Something other than a sleeve of crackers with a spoon of peanut butter. 

He’s about to go to his chest of snacks to do just that when his email pings again. He rubs his eyes three times to make sure he can read correctly:

_Nicolo,_

_Seven sounds perfect. Would you like to meet off-campus? I know a lovely spot._

_Here’s my number: 703-xxx-xxxx_

_I will see you soon, Nicolo, and I look forward to discussing poetry with you further._

_Joe._

There’s a link to a nice restaurant attached, and Nicky can look at his bank account later and hyperventilate, but for now, he folds his laptop up and hugs it to his chest, smiling to himself. He forgets all about dinner-snack and sinks back down to the mattress where he falls into a blissful, stress-less sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> coming up next:
> 
> Andy scolds Joe for getting close with a mortal!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading so far!!!  
> I'd love to hear your thoughts/predictions/anything at all! I hope you're all doing well, and happy weekend!


	2. A Handful of Firsts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe and Nicky go on their first date, but not before a word of warning from an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO!
> 
> I was blown away by how kind you all were on the first chapter <3 <3 <3 Seriously, thank you all so much! I'm sorry this is coming so late in the night today (or maybe not, if you aren't EDT like me), but I remembered Lucifer had new episodes, and oops, there went the afternoon.
> 
> Anyway, I really hope you enjoy this chapter! It got away from me, and I had to cut like four scenes from the end to put in the next chapter because I looked up and I had almost 7000 words. Oops!!!!
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Nicky deals with anxiety/depression -- has a panic attack that a friend helps to redirect  
> References to death of parents

Yusuf al-Kaysani has never given much thought to the concept of _weekends._

They’re a relatively new invention, after all, and it’s not like he was taking a lot of rest days when he and the team were taking out bad guys around the world.

But, he and Nile have been settled in America’s capital for over a year now, and he’s come to enjoy the thought of working all week, grading papers and offering critiques and sending emails, just to settle into his little couch on Friday evenings and watch some football or read a book. 

He’s usually positively bored out of his mind on the weekends. He’s never liked anything quite so much as being bored on the weekend. It’s different than the cynical, bitter boredom that defined entire centuries here and there; this is a settling sort of boredom, where he can pop his feet up on the coffee table and listen to Nile complain about some asshole professor in her department (and he always likes to make plans to find those professors in his own time and find ways to irritate them, a little bit of payback for his little sister and darling friend), or fish Booker out of yet another dive bar when he comes to visit.

But this weekend, Yusuf has _plans._ Actual plans. It’s the most human thing in the world to have plans, and he finds himself looking at the clock as he wraps up office hours on Friday afternoon, grinning to himself with anticipation.

“Heading out, Dr. Jones?” his colleague asks him as he jogs down the stairs at precisely 4:31, right after his established hours end.

“I think we’ve worked hard enough this week, don’t you, Lisa?” He asks, grinning widely. 

She nods and says _TGIF,_ which he remembers is a strange, American thing that takes the divine and makes it secular; he waves to Lisa cheerfully while saying some inane response that he will not be able to remember in five minutes.

The air is cold when he bursts out of the front doors of Trumbull, the sun already starting to set. The wind carries a sharp, metallic tinge to it, that strange smell of a city settling into winter, and while D.C. is noticeably cleaner than some cities they’ve lived in -- Dupont Circle especially -- he still studiously avoids the puddles because they’re still steeped in filth and muck that he’d rather not get on his very nice shoes.

It’s not that he thinks tonight will go poorly -- no, there’s no chance of that. He’s picked the perfect restaurant, and he laid out the perfect outfit this morning (and no, he didn’t think about it all day Thursday, and he certainly didn’t take photos and send them to Nile for approval), and he’s going to spend time with someone who …

Well, Yusuf doesn’t want to say that Nicolo Genova is perfect; people aren’t perfect. Nine hundred years of existence has confirmed that. But Nicolo Genova is something probably a little bit better than perfect -- someone _good_. 

He doesn’t know how Nile hasn’t mentioned Nicolo before this point -- although, when he really thinks about it as he walks swiftly past the Metro station towards the Massachusetts Ave traffic circle, he thinks maybe she _had_ mentioned a Nick who was her TA in a class last year -- but he’s very glad she thought to send Nicolo to him for help on his paper.

The odds of someone born in the 1990s finding a poem that he wrote seven hundred years ago, and then being able to find him to ask for a translation … well, Yusuf is not a very superstitious person, but he likes to think that the chances of that happening are astronomical. 

And, the chances of that someone being a beautiful, soft-spoken man who lights up from within when talking about poetry, someone who blushes and laughs at himself and looks at art thoughtfully and looks like he stepped out of Michelangelo’s sketchbook. Well. 

Let’s just say, Yusuf owes Nile a very, very nice gift.

Ten minutes later, he walks up the steps to the townhouse he’s been renting on Church Street, and he fumbles with his keys for a second, his fingers slightly numb from the cold. When he gets the door open, he slips inside, the ache in his bones already fading as he hangs up his jacket and tosses his keys into the small ceramic bowl that the homeowner had left behind when they went on sabbatical.

The heater hasn’t kicked on fully yet, but he doesn’t mind the slight coolness on his face; it’s relieving, actually, considering that he thinks he’s legitimately nervous for the first time in hundreds of years -- all because his brain had to go and flash _what if Nicolo does not like American-Italian food?_ in the middle of his imaginings for the evening.

Yusuf goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and he rests his back against the counter as he drinks, thinking about the way Nicolo had smiled at him, shy and uncertain, when he’d suggested dinner: a wild, spectacular disbelief in his eyes, to the point that Yusuf almost wanted to shake him and ask _why wouldn’t I want to spend an evening with you? Who wouldn’t sell their right foot for the chance?_

He’s been on dates, of course -- many one-night stands and fumblings in alleyways and bathrooms and even some nicer hotel accommodations. He’s charmed and dazzled and always had plenty of fun, delightful and consensual fun, but he isn’t sure if tonight will end like that. He isn’t sure he wants tonight to end like that (he won’t complain if it does).

He’s getting ahead of himself. Yusuf finishes his glass of water and clears his throat; he addresses the much more immediate problem than his sudden, ridiculous crush on a twentysomething.

“Back already?” Yusuf asks the shadows of his living room, setting his glass down and crossing his arms over his chest.

A figure melts out of the shadows and materializes at the edge of the kitchen; she’s barely illuminated by the last streaks of sunlight coming through the bay window.

“It’s been eight months, Joe.” 

“Is that all?” 

He knows better than to ask _did you find her?_

It’s not that he’s given up hope; it’s that he never had much hope in the first place. It doesn’t stop Yusuf from saying _yes, of course,_ everytime she asks him for help.

“I saw the clothes on the bed.” Andy tilts her head at him, her steel blue eyes assessing his posture. “Where you headed off to? Hot date?”

He hums. “Something like that.”

“Those pants will make your ass look great,” Andy comments, and Yusuf smirks at her teasingly. Her eyes don’t warm in the slightest. “Someone special?”

“Someone new,” Yusuf answers easily, trying to communicate that it’s a first date.

(He doesn’t need to say that first dates usually mean last dates; he doesn’t want to say that with Nicolo, who goes to his university, who shares space with Nile, who smiles like he’s reflecting some far off light, gentle, lovely things that soothe like cool silver -- he doesn’t say that with Nicolo, he doesn’t want the first date to be the last one)

He doesn’t need to say any of that because Andy sees all the possible turns in their conversation; she probably already knows what he’s thinking. Six thousand years, and you can pick up every potential move on the chessboard pretty quickly.

“Nile said he’s … good. And that you’re taking him to dinner.” Yusuf doesn’t move a muscle. “Is this a good idea, getting involved with one of them?” Her voice isn’t unkind, exactly. Still assessing.

“You talk like they’re a different species.”

(He doesn’t point out that she’s never objected to his one night stands, his flings, his flirtations; he’s never objected to hers, either -- somehow she can tell that it’s different, even while he’s still trying to tell himself it won’t be)

Her eyes are kind now, and he hates it. “Aren’t they?”

Joe shrugs, tries to hide how he wants to flinch. “He’s cute. He’s smart. I like the way he blushes. That’s all.”

“If that’s all it was, I wouldn’t be worried.”

Andy walks to him and rests her hand on his shoulder; he leans into the touch, and looks up at her, their eyes meeting for a long, painful moment. She looks tired, he realizes.

He can cancel his plans; he can tell Nicolo that now isn’t a good time. He can take Andy to eat something, put her to bed. He won’t even feel bad about it -- no matter what his stomach does to tangle itself in knots at the thought of Nicolo’s eyes, Andy is his family.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Joe,” Andy says instead, her voice heavy with something bigger than exhaustion. 

She’s gone a second later, and he doesn’t even hear his front door close behind her.

* * *

_Hello, Joe. Do you still want to meet outside the grad offices?_

Nicky sends the text with fumbling fingers, almost misspelling grad as _grade_ three times while he hisses between his teeth at the ridiculous uselessness of autocorrect. He grimaces immediately at the implications of his text -- he should have asked _do you still want to meet?_

It’s not like they’ve been texting back and forth outside of the confirmation of their plans yesterday, which Nicky had only done to make sure he had Joe’s number. Part of him might actually be relieved if he cancelled -- he’s been fighting off a headache since he met Dr. Jones, and with his dissertation now at a comfortable word count (even if Andrews wants him to re-work more passages than he wants him to leave alone), part of him just wants to curl up in his bed, pull the covers over his head, and sleep through the weekend.

He’s exhausted, and it’s a shitty time of year, and it’s cold outside, and he wants to be home, where it’s decidedly less grey than it is here; he wants to be someone who isn’t Nicolo Genova. His knee has started to twinge in a you’re-almost-thirty kind of way, and his back isn’t much better from hunching over his computer, and God, he just -- 

He wants --

“Nicky?”

River’s there suddenly, in the entrance to his cubicle, and he looks up, hands braced on the back of his neck.

“Hey,” he manages to say, sliding his hands down to wipe nervously at the edge of his collarbone. 

“Are you okay?” She comes and sits on his desk, her dark brown eyes fixed on his face with clear concern.

“I guess I’m …” he waves a hand around in the air, not knowing the succinct way to say that he’s homesick for a home that doesn’t even exist anymore, for an innocence that was a lie to begin with -- and worse, homesick for something that he’s never had.

“Nervous about your date?” She nudges his chair with her foot, and he nods weakly, glad for the out, even if he feels pathetic. 

The lights in the office are overbright, and he’s about five minutes away from a panic attack or from slipping into the dark corner of his brain he tries not to touch when he has so much work to do, but then suddenly, River’s standing in front of him, and he’s pushed back from the desk. Her hands are on his shoulders, and her eyes are on his.

“You gotta breathe,” River says firmly. “Breathe with me.”

He’s startled enough to obey, and she breathes slowly, in and out, deep, gulping breaths that are in for four seconds, out for four seconds. He recognizes the technique from the therapy sessions he’d attended when he had insurance that covered therapy sessions, and after a minute of it, his brain settles and clicks into something more stable.

“Thanks,” he says wearily as she sits back down on the desk; his legs are sprawled out in front of him, and he can see how his jeans are frayed at the cuffs. 

“My brother had asthma,” River says suddenly, and Nicky looks up from his examination of his ancient pants to frown at her thoughtfully. It’s the first time she’s ever mentioned her family to him.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” River nods and kicks her Converse against the desk. “It was hard for him to breathe sometimes, and we couldn’t always get him his medication, so … so we had to do different kinds of breathing with him when his symptoms were acting up.”

“Oh.” Nicky nods and tucks away this fragile treasure of information; in the daze of his anxiety, he can still tell what a unique thing it is, to be given a piece of her past. “Thank you, River.”

She looks heartbreakingly sad suddenly, and Nicky feels a flare of guilt he can’t explain. It must be hard for her to talk about her family, he decides. He understands that. He really understands that.

He opens his mouth, about to suggest he call Dr. Jones and postpone their dinner, so he and River can go and eat Easy Mac on his shitty mattress while watching Drag Race or Parks and Recreation, when his phone buzzes. River scoops it up, the flash of pain on her face already tucked away.

“Oooh, it’s from Dr. Jones,” she says in a teasing, sing-song voice, and Nicky decides that this is safe and comfortable enough, and if she wants to not turn back, he won’t make her. 

(It’s not like she’s ever pushed him for why he has panic attacks or why he spends three days in bed sometimes; he can do the same for his friend)

“What does Dr. Jones say?” Nicky asks, scooting his chair forward to peer at his phone.

“He says that he’ll meet you out front in twenty minutes,” River lifts her eyebrows at him and waves a hand in front of his face. “And oh _wow,_ I feel like I might need Confession after reading this, I didn’t know you guys had gotten _there_ yet--”

“What?” Nicky yelps, his ears burning as he grabs his phone, staring at the screen wildly.

There’s no hint of a sexty, or whatever they’re called, just a brief text from Joe saying that he’ll be there in twenty minutes.

“Ugh!” Nicky flings his phone at River and buries his face in his hands for a second. “You’re trying to kill me!”

“All part of my evil plan to snag Andrews as an advisor,” River snorts, kicking at his chair and managing to send him flying across the cubicle. “Should you get changed now?”

Nicky pauses, his laughter from the previous moment forgotten. He stares down at his grey t-shirt, blue sweater, and jeans. “Fuck me. Should I change?”

“No!” River says, way too quickly. “No, no, no! It’s a good outfit.”

“Oh God, the Yelp had so many dollar signs for this place,” Nicky moans, face back in his hands again. “Madre di Dio, it had four dollar signs, they are going to throw me out into the trash can-”

“Nooo!” River protests, “No, you make it work somehow!”

Nicky lowers his hands and shoots her a look of abject betrayal. 

After some soothing and a lot of pep talks, Nicky finds himself standing outside the grad offices, shivering slightly in the growing cold. He wonders if he should have pulled on his jacket this morning when he left for the offices, but it had been fifty degrees then, and the Weather app on his phone had sworn to him that it wouldn’t get below 45 tonight.

Lying, evil app.

Right as he’s debating going inside and begging River for one of her amazing vintage 80s jackets that she has no small supply of, he hears someone calling his full name, the vowels correct for once.

“Nicolo!” Joe walks towards him, looking good enough to make his mouth go dry. “How are you?”

He holds his arm out, and Nicky opens his own arms for an awkward hug -- only to realize that Joe had been extending his hand for a handshake. Like a normal person.

“Uh,” Nicky stumbles for a second, but Joe laughs and hugs him with strong arms.

And that’s it, he ascends; he shifts out of the mortal plane and God actually wants him after all because he’s floating on high, soul immaculate once more because Joe’s chest is firm and warm, and he smells like sandalwood and spice and something masculine that makes Nicky warble something unintelligible into the cold air over Joe’s shoulder.

“Sorry?” Joe asks politely as they step out of the hug.

Nicky tries not to notice that he’s immediately cold again. 

“I said, you look nice,” Nicky says, face heating up because he didn’t mean to say that at all.

But Joe _does_ look good, in a way that suggests that he not only knows that he looks good, but that he also doesn’t care that he looks good. Because he must always look good. Leather jacket, tight shirt that’s clearly designer, pants that make Nicky’s brain make a little high-pitched whine like the fuzz on a tv that’s been left on for too long.

“You do too,” Joe says genuinely, eyes sweeping over Nicky in a way that would be obtrusive from anyone else; but, Nicky wants Joe to look at him. It’s unusual, and he doesn’t think he hates the feeling of wanting to be seen if it’s by Joe Jones.

“The restaurant is this way,” Joe says waving a hand up the street, and Nicky nods, stomach in knots again. 

“Did you get a chance to look at the menu?” Joe asks for conversation as they walk down the street. “Do you think it looks good?”

Nicky had looked at the prices on the menu. 

He’d also transferred money from his meager savings into his checking account to pay for this, but he has a feeling he’ll be checking his banking app under the table the whole time, staring at his accounts and wondering if it’s really enough for a meal at this absurdly nice restaurant they’re going to.

Maybe if he orders a side salad and eats some complimentary bread. It’s more nutrients than Easy Mac, so he won’t even be that put out about it.

He hums and fidgets with his keys in his pocket, and Joe seems to slow down. 

“Is something wrong?” His voice is gentle, not upset, but Nicky still flinches, his anxiety flaring up again.

He makes himself laugh, so Joe doesn’t feel like he has to feel bad for him. “It’s just a … a little fancier than what I normally do.”

 _These days_ , he doesn’t say. 

“It’s terrible to be worried about which fork to use, yes?” 

Joe smiles at him when he looks over, and Nicky nods and smiles back thinly. He doesn’t mention that he’s known which fork to use since he was three.

“I guess I don’t usually go to those restaurants on a graduate student budget,” Nicky says. “I do not live the fancy life of a professor.” 

It’s a joke, obviously; Nicky’s shocked that a professor as young as Dr. Jones could even afford a place like the one they’re headed to, especially in the city on an adjunct’s salary.

Joe frowns a little, and Nicky worries that he’s said the wrong thing; Joe speaks Italian at least conversationally, and he almost considers switching so that he’s less liable to make a fool of himself.

“I’ll be treating you,” Joe points out as they round the corner; pedestrians headed to the bars scoot past them as they cross the street, and Nicky lets the words fully settle before they meet back up on the curb cut.

They stand there, pedestrians still passing by them, a flood of people going about their evening with no idea that the nervous, sweaty man they’re passing is on the brink of an anxiety attack.

Nicky doesn’t look at the crowd of people, only looks at Joe, frustrated and flattered and nervous.

“But you translated the poem for me,” he protests. “I should pay. I’ll pay.”

Joe laughs and shakes his head. “I’d love to treat you, Nicolo because _you’re_ the one who made my week interesting.”

“That would be rude,” Nicky insists. “You said that we would get dinner as a thanks for the translation, and--”

“Fine.” Joe shrugs, argument already slipping past, and he touches Nicky on the elbow. Even through the wool of his sweater, it sends warmth tingling up through his shoulder joint. “I’ll pay next time.”

_Next time._

Nicky’s brain disconnects again, and then he nods.

“If there’s a restaurant that you think is suitably … what was it, fancy? I’d be happy to go there.” 

Nicky would be more mortified at the reality that Joe definitely knows that he’s broke, but Joe has a PhD, and on top of that, he’s an artist, so he probably knows that it is absolutely awful to be living on a grad student stipend. 

“Uhm.” Nicky glances down the block. There’s a Nando’s a few blocks away, which he and River have gone to in celebration of a terrible course ending, and there’s a few tiny spots that aren’t packed and full of drunken college kids. 

“Do you have a particular kind of food you like?” Nicky asks, wondering why they hadn’t just had this conversation two days ago.

_Because you were stumbling around and making an embarrassment of yourself._

“I enjoy most food,” Joe shrugs and looks down the block too, as though trying to help Nicky make a decision and end this awkwardness. “Do you know any good halal places?”

Nicky perks up and nods, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s taken Joe’s hand and tugs him down the block. “I know a really great place!” He says, ecstatic that he can make this work. “There’s not a lot of seating, but, uh-”

He flushes when he realizes that he’s holding Joe’s hand; he releases him immediately, his fingertips still warm from the contact. “Uh. But maybe we could get it to-go and …”

“Sounds wonderful,” Joe says calmly, smiling at him like Nicky isn’t shining a beacon of terrible social anxiety down on himself.

They walk to Halal Guys, which is in the opposite direction from campus, and after Nicky pays (without having to check his bank account, thank the Lord) for their falafel, they take it to a nearby park and settle on a bench, balancing the to-go containers on their knees. 

Joe hums approvingly as the smell wafts up, and Nicky feels undeservedly pleased with the smile on the other man’s face; it’s not like he cooked this, but he can’t deny that he’s strangely happy that he at least paid for it. 

(He’s never happy spending money, after all, but if it made Joe smile, then it’s definitely worth it).

“We passed a church on the way here,” Joe says, pointing up the block with his fork. “A beautiful building.”

Nicky doesn’t look up, only stabs at some rice with his own flimsy fork. “St. Matthew’s.”

“Have you been inside?” It’s an easy enough question, but Nicky tenses all the same.

 _There’s no way he’d know about any of it,_ he rationalizes.

“Yes,” he answers, more blunt than he’d like. “Not in several years, though.”

Joe doesn’t continue that line of conversation, thankfully, either because he can hear the reluctant anger in Nicky’s voice, or because he’s already moved on. 

“How long have you been in DC?” Nicky asks, because it seems like a logical follow-up question to someone who doesn’t seem to know what Saint Matthew the Apostle looks like.

“A little over a year. They offered me a temporary position, and I was tired of traveling.” Joe smiles and takes a sip of water. “You? You said you moved here when you were younger; why did you stay?”

“My parents died,” Nicky says flatly, and Joe nods, doesn’t give him any of that bullshit of _I’m sorry._ “We moved here for my father’s job, and I had already been accepted to university in Virginia. So, I stayed.”

He doesn’t want to be so tense. Fuck, he’s a terrible date. Maybe those dates from Grindr weren’t bad; maybe he was the one who was an awful time, and --

 _Well, that one guy did slap a condom on the table at the restaurant and jab a thumb back at the bathroom with an offer to meet him back there in five --_ Nicky decides that maybe he isn’t the _only_ reason his recent dates have failed.

He takes a deep breath and tries to smile more charmingly at Joe, but he sees that Joe’s gaze is as level and discerning as ever.

”How were you able to translate that poem so quickly?” Nicky asks, partly to steer the conversation to more comfortable waters, partly because he’s been legitimately curious since Wednesday. 

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t a short poem, but you translated every verse,” Nicky says, shaking his head. “It would take me longer than that to translate a poem in modern Italian over to English.”

“Ah.” Joe shrugs with a smile. “I had fun translating it; sort of like a game.”

That wasn’t answering the question, but Nicky supposes that it would sound like bragging if Joe pointed out that he was probably a genius. Because of course he was a genius. And Nicky was just Nicky, sitting on a park bench with a beautiful man, wondering if he should have worn a different shirt, wanting to lean over and sit a little closer to his warmth for a second longer. He’s just Nicky, on a park bench, decidedly not a genius, decidedly regular.

And Joe is anything but.

“The poem was beautiful,” Nicky says honestly to distract himself from the tangle of thoughts in his head, and Joe looks down at his food, as though he felt bashful. “It must be even more lovely in its original verse.”

“It is,” Joe agrees, “I barely did it justice.”

Nicky shakes his head in disagreement. “Your translation was good,” he assures him, “Very good for my dissertation, at least.” They share a companionable smile, and it feels nice; some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. “It feels like I know the author.”

“Oh?” Joe lifts an eyebrow, and Nicky nods.

“The longing. The confusion -- he feels so alone, and so … so afraid. Like he isn’t sure if he can make it through the world without a partner.” Nicky stares at his colorful bowl of food, turned to greys in the dim streetlamps. “I … I think the emotion of it was very understandable.”

“Luckily it is a love poem, and not a tragedy,” Joe comments, and Nicky thinks about this for a second.

“The poem was written in a time where he couldn’t have married his partner, even if he did exist. He’s addressing a hypothetical man the whole time, assuring him that his love will be like … what was it, _how the sun loves the moon, and waits to kiss the back of his neck at the cusp of dawn_ .” Nicky’s smile feels frayed at the edges. “But, even if he finds him, they cannot live the way a man and a woman can. It’s a love poem, _and_ it’s a tragedy.”

“Maybe the poet had his happy ending.”

Nicky considers this as well: he knows that homosexuality wasn’t brutally handled in all parts of the world the way it was in, for instance, 1500 England. But -

“The poem does not conclude,” Nicky says, hoping he doesn’t sound too obstinate. “It ends with the man turning the corner in a marketplace, hopeful that he’ll finally see his love. It just ends.”

“Many things end,” Joe counters. “That does not mean it is a tragedy. Love is love, even when it is temporary.”

“I don’t think love is temporary.” Nicky’s entirely forgotten his food at this point. “I think … I think it leaves marks on you, and even if things change, that love is there. At your core, you will have that love. And it is not a bad thing, even if it has nowhere to go. You can … put it somewhere else. Use it to make something good in the world.”

Joe stares at him for a long moment, and he wonders if he sounds like an idiot; he isn’t sleep-deprived anymore, not really, but he’s also on his last bit of control over his anxiety, and he’s still exhausted from the weak, and Joe makes his stomach do strange flippy-things when he smiles or tilts his head a certain way or looks at Nicky.

He really wants to hold his hand again.

“Nicolo Genova,” Joe says instead, an inordinate amount of wonder in his voice.

Nicky shifts awkwardly. “What?”

“Just that.” Joe’s eyes don’t leave his face. “Nicolo Genova.”

Nicky’s face burns, and he stares at his falafel so he doesn’t do something stupid like cry because Joe said his name, which really any person in the world could do (but suddenly his name feels like _something_ like it has some kind of meaning, when Joe says it, and that’s such a silly thing to think about a person he’s just met).

Half a minute later, Joe’s asking him what his favorite thing in the city is, and the very-full-moment passes into something more peaceful, and Nicky sinks into it.

“In a few weeks, they’ll light the tree in front of the White House.” Nicky smiles at the thought of it. “It’s very pretty. My mother took me to see it, our first winter here.” 

He’d been fifteen, and cross with his mother in the way that fifteen-year-old boys were, irritated but fond enough to go along with it when she had him bundle up and walk all the way downtown, which felt like an eon to him as a teenager, but was really only a little over a mile.

“Do you celebrate Christmas?” Joe asks, and Nicky shakes his head.

“I don’t go to Mass anymore.” Nicky forces himself to breathe for a second or two. “I - I still like the tree, though. They have a menorah too, and a Yule log, and cider, and it feels … happy.” He doesn’t have a better word for it, and he flushes a little, worried that he sounds childish. 

“Do you think it will snow by the time they light the tree?” Joe asks, looking up at the sky.

Nicky looks up too, and he watches the lights of the stars sneak out from passing wisps of clouds. “It will probably rain. It seems to love to rain here in this awful swamp.”

Joe laughs, a bright, beautiful noise, and Nicky looks over at him, more pleased than he’s been all evening at the smile that shines from Joe’s face. 

He thinks, weirdly enough, of Icarus from the stories he’d learned as a boy. Joe is the sun, Nicky thinks, and he’s going to fly right into him unless he’s careful.

(He isn’t sure he wants to be careful)

They both agree that they hate the winter, and they hate how damp it can get -- Joe was born in the north of Africa, Nicky learns, near the desert, and he can only imagine how gross the humidity here must be in comparison. It opens up a flowing conversation about the places they’ve lived, and Nicky is shocked that Joe has actually lived more places than he has.

He tells Joe about his father’s position as a diplomat; he doesn’t tell Joe how his father died, or his mother, but he does tell him about the little townhouse they lived in near the embassy, and how he’d learned how to drive, in D.C., on the Massachusetts Ave traffic circle with a diplomat’s license plate, “so of course, everyone hated me,” and he gets Joe to laugh again when he tells the story about how he accidentally drove down the wrong side of 395 when he was driving back from prom. 

Joe tells him a story that _has_ to be made up, about how he almost was killed by an art thief in Belgium, but there’s so many details in the story that Nicky isn’t sure where to call him on the lie.

They talk for what feels like hours, but also no time at all, and Nicky forgets the flutter of nerves in his stomach because it’s settled into what feels like a soft glow that trembles with every smile on Joe’s face. It’s very safe to say that he’s never in his life felt this way, like there’s electricity flowing under his skin, like he’s actually in the right place for once.

Eventually, the flood of people walking past them to the bars becomes a trickle of people, and Nicky realizes that they’ve been sitting in quiet for more than a minute. It doesn’t feel awkward. It’s the opposite, warm and soft and soothing; he can feel Joe at the end of the bench, and the buzzing is back at the base of his skull.

It worries him that it’s a sign his migraine might really start soon, so he yawns a little and stretches his neck, thinking of an excuse to get up, when Joe checks his watch and makes a surprised noise. 

“It’s almost eleven, and it’s getting cold,” he eyes Nicky’s sweater with a teasing smirk. “Next time, you should wear a jacket.”

“Next time,” Nicky repeats, too excited at the prospect to protest. 

“Are you walking home?” Joe asks. “Or taking the Metro?”

Nicky takes the signal gratefully, albeit regretfully, and stands, stretching out his lower back before closing the lid to his container. “Walking. I live near campus.”

“Let me walk you home,” Joe offers, standing to throw away his trash. 

Nicky holds his container in one hand, and leaves the other free to swing between him and Joe as he walks; he feels like a teenager on their first date at a movie theatre, their hand on the armrest and flipped up in hopes of contact. It’s a juvenile move.

It works, though; Joe takes his hand as they walk up Connecticut and head back to campus. Joe’s fingers are a shock of warmth in the brisk air, and Joe hisses adorably when he feels Nicky’s hands.

“You’re so cold,” he says, almost indignant. 

“You’re so warm,” Nicky answers with a smile.

“Next time, you’ll wear two jackets.” Joe lights up and starts to shrug out of his leather jacket. “Or! You can wear mine--”

“It’s not that far back to campus,” Nicky laughs, waving off the attempt. “You are very kind, but I will make it.”

He regrets the decision immediately when his hindbrain reminds him that Joe smells like sex, or what he assumes sex smells like.

 _Next time,_ echoes in his mind, and he can’t hide his smile. Nicky bites on his bottom lip and looks away, knowing that his cheeks are flecked with cold, but are more reddened by the giddy excitement in his system. 

Joe wraps his hands around Nicky’s and rubs his fingers gently as they walk, before humming satisfactorily and switching to just lacing their fingers together. 

Nicky bows his head and stares at his feet when they pass people on the sidewalk, but no one seems to care about the way they hold hands, and his shoulders lose some tension. They’re not anywhere where they’d be immediately called out for hand-holding, he tells himself. This isn’t high school; this isn’t church. He can hold Joe’s hand.

And his hands are lovely to hold; his fingers are long, and warm, and strangely absent any callouses he’d expect from an artist. They’re also perfectly groomed, and Nicky becomes painfully aware of how many hangnails he has. Joe doesn’t seem to care though; his thumb starts to stroke gently over Nicky’s palm, and that alone makes his heart rate accelerate. 

“Your hands are much warmer now,” Joe says as they turn down Nicky’s street. 

“Thanks,” Nicky says, “it was very generous of you.”

“Don’t thank me.” Joe smiles at him, and his stomach responds by flipping a dozen times. “I just wanted an excuse to hold your hand.”

He’s certainly blushing now. Luckily, they’re nearing his building and he gestures at it; their feet slow on the approach until they’re facing each other under the light outside the door. He can hear the distant, muffled sound of music from the second floor, and he can smell something putrid, like another student had lost their dinner on the way to a party, and his butt is fully cold now as the temperature continues to drop.

But he doesn’t care about any of it because Joe is looking at him and smiling so nicely that Nicky thinks he might actually want to take a picture of it, so he can convince himself that it was real in the morning.

“When can we do this again?” Joe asks, eyeing the door behind him as it opens and some kids come spilling out.

Nicky feels mystified again. “I’m … I’m usually free at night, but--”

“But?”

“Why would … someone like you,” Nicky gestures at Joe with his food container because Joe’s still holding his other hand, “...want to hang out with … someone like me?”

“Someone like me?” Joe lifts his eyebrows and squeezes his hand a little. “Someone like you?”

“You know,” Nicky shrugs and laughs awkwardly when Joe’s eyebrows don’t budge. 

“Also, you say ‘hanging out,’” Joe continues. “But, I thought, or hoped this … might have been a date?”

“Guh,” Nicky says intelligently. He doesn’t even have the excuse of sleep deprivation this time, he has simply lost the power of speech. “I mean. Yeah. I’d like that. A date.” _Even if it doesn’t make any sense to me._

“Alright.” Joe’s smile widens, and he takes a small step forward; he’s a little taller than Nicky, even if his shoulders are narrower, but Nicky likes the shape of his body, likes the way he feels standing in front of him. “It’s a date, then.”

“Yeah,” Nicky agrees.

“Can I kiss you?” Joe asks, and Nicky blinks, surprised even further.

He nods quickly though, recovering, and Joe’s still smiling when he steps in further -- Nicky steps in too -- and their lips meet briefly, a lightning bolt of a moment where Nicky’s heart forgets to beat.

It’s over quickly, but not before Nicky can catalogue how soft Joe’s lips are, how pleasantly his beard scratches against his chin and cheek, how Joe’s breath sounds when it’s this close to him --

It’s less than three seconds, and chaste even by Nicky’s standards, but he still feels dazed, like he might topple over, when they break away from each other. 

“Can I walk you home?” Nicky blurts out foolishly before wincing (although it doesn’t sound awful, them taking turns walking each other home until the sun rises; he thinks he’d like that)

Joe laughs though, and it’s not at Nicky’s expense. It’s a sound of delight, and it makes his toes curl in his sneakers. 

“I can more than take care of myself.” Joe winks, and then leans in and kisses Nicky’s cheek. “But you’re sweet.”

Nicky takes in Joe’s full profile, takes in the way his leather jacket frames his shoulders, his trim chest, and the confident way he carries himself. Yeah, Joe can take care of himself.

“Did you just check me out,” Joe teases, “or is my hair messy?”

“Nicely tousled,” Nicky counters, and Joe laughs again, that same burst of delighted joy. 

It earns him another kiss on the cheek, and Nicky’s fully blushing as he climbs his steps and turns around at the last second to wave at Joe.

“Goodnight, Dr. Jones,” he says, looking down at the sidewalk where Joe is still wreathed in light.

“I’ll see you soon, Nicolo Genova.” It sounds like a promise, and Nicky’s face aches from holding a smile for so long.

He really, really hopes Joe has walked away from the front door when he trips over the sixth step up to the second floor. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhhh!!!
> 
> So, I'll be honest, I originally planned a 5 chapter, 30K-ish medium-fic for this, but ... this could really easily be a longfic. Blah!!! Please let me know your thoughts, if you're enjoying Millennial!Nicky, if you want to see more Joe/Nicky dates and falling in love, or if you just want me to skip right into the angst angst angst of Joe grappling with his secret identity/immortality in the face of loving a mortal person.


	3. Dinner Date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe and Nicky have another dinner date, but this one is a little more ... personal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!!! 
> 
> I continue to be blown away by the support from everyone! Thank you, thank you to everyone who's read and left some kind of encouragement! Again, this is coming very late at night on a work day (work is awful busy right now!!!!) so I apologize for the hour if you're EDT as well, and I'm sorry for how ......... this sort of advances the plot (Joe's sadness, Nicky's background), but also just indulges in a domestic scene a little. 
> 
> Anyway:  
>  **warnings**  
>  References to sex ( no one has sex yet, sorry!)  
> Blood TW  
> Self-inflicted injury (accidental, knife, not a life threatening injury at all!)

Good moods are hard to come by, most days. 

Yusuf would never say he was prone to bad moods -- not at all. He knows himself to be a genial person, only inspired to anger in the most intense moments when his family is threatened. He also does not spend much time fretting over minor inconveniences, or weeping over the difficulties (many, frequent, accumulating) this life has given him. 

But, he also is rarely happy. 

It’s not something that bothers him. It’s been a very long life, after all, and Yusuf does not feel extreme joy or extreme grief other than rare occasions where one of the two will grow so fiercely in his chest that it threatens to tear him apart. He is, by all means, an even-keeled person. Temperate. Calm. He’s lived with himself for almost a thousand years; he thinks he can say that with confidence.

But Yusuf runs up the steps to his front door, grinning from ear to ear; he whistles -- actually fucking whistles -- as he fits the key to the lock; when he gets inside, the lock fastened behind him, his head on the wood of the door, he tilts his chin up to the ceiling and laughs like a dreamy, besotted child in a movie.

For the first time in a long time, Yusuf al-Kaysani is  _ happy.  _

Humming, he moves through his home, shuffling pieces of junk mail collecting on the small table, fixing a picture that’s hanging crooked, his socked feet moving smoothly over polished hardwood. He’d sing aloud, but that would mean he would have to stop grinning -- and it’s a beast of a grin, ear to ear, cheeks aching. 

Something small and round and very warm is blooming in his chest. It’s nothing like the intensity of his emotions in the past: it’s humble. Little. Promising. Yusuf imagines it as a small sun. 

No. Too bright, too harsh, too  _ sure.  _ This is quiet, soft, beautiful.

This is the moon. 

His life before had felt dark; the night seems to grow darker and longer with every passing year, the world spinning further into chaos. He hasn’t forgotten that suddenly. He never could, he’s seen too much. The dark is still there, but now the moon grows in his chest, now there is light in his darkness, now there is  _ hope. _

The moon is here, and it lives in a ramshackle apartment building, half a mile away.

He’s in such a good mood that he doesn’t throw the knife he keeps hidden in his jacket into the dark shape draped over his couch.

“You know,” Yusuf says cheerfully, cleaning up an abandoned bottle from the floor, “family still means you need to knock.”

“Bonjour, Joseph.” Booker doesn’t even sit up from where he’s collapsed on the cushions. “Good night?”

“The best night.” Yusuf tosses the empty wine bottle into the recycling bin and washes his hands thoroughly before grabbing a glass of water.

He thinks about it, and grabs another glass of water.

“Drink,” Yusuf orders Booker, settling into the crack of space at the end of the couch, only available because Booker has drawn his long legs up to his chest.

Booker does, and it’s a little messy and pathetic because he won’t sit up, but Yusuf is in a good mood, damnit. Booker isn’t going to change that.

“Cute date?” Booker asks once his water is half-drunk, and he’s got a bleary eye cracked open. He’s still drunk because he’s talking in French (not Yusuf’s favorite language) and his words are slurred.

Yusuf gives him a look and doesn’t answer. It just makes Booker smile.

“Relax,” Booker mumbles, dropping an arm over his eyes. “I’m not going to steal them from you.”

“Not like this you won’t.” Yusuf sniffs pointedly; Booker reeks of liquor. “Did you bathe in it?”

He’s going to have to deep clean his couch cushions. Again. He doesn’t want to know what the young couple who own the carpet cleaner place think of him.

“I’m almost sober.” 

Yusuf glares at him.

Booker drains the rest of his glass and sets it on the ground next to him. “85 … 87% sober.”

“You need a hobby,” Yusuf comments idly, his good mood not abating despite his lingering irritation with Booker’s habits. “Have you considered crochet?”

“Nile taught me how to crochet ten years ago. She said I was a natural,” Booker grumbles. His ears go pink when he talks about Nile -- Yusuf noticed in 2005. He wonders when Booker will notice.

(He and Andy might have money on it. Maybe.)

“Nile likes you a lot more than I do.”

“Oh?” Booker sits upright at that, his legs sliding gracelessly to the floor. His entire neck is red now. “Did she … did she say that?”

Yusuf pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re both children,” he mutters to himself.

“Says the man who went on a date with a mortal today,” Booker teases, and Yusuf’s good mood evaporates.

Great. Fucking great.

Booker realizes his mistake when Yusuf’s body language shifts with a near violence. “Merde. I’m sorry. I’m sorry --” he touches Yusuf’s arm. “It’s not like that. I know it’s not -- I’m an asshole, Jesus -- I’m fucking sorry, Joe.”

“It’s fine.” It’s not fine.

(Nicolo Genova laughs with starlight in his eyes; Nicolo Genova blushes when he’s complimented like he’s not one of the most beautiful people Yusuf’s seen in a thousand years; Nicolo Genova eats with his left hand, doesn’t seem to notice how he shrinks himself in crowds to make other people’s lives easier, holds the door for strangers, is exceptionally kind to everyone but himself; Nicolo Genova is going to die one day, and Yusuf doesn’t know why the universe could think that’s fair, to let him keep on living and to make Nicolo Genova die when he has very important things to do, like being Nicolo Genova)

“Joe?” Booker nudges him without touch, pulling him out of his spiral of premature grief. “Do you want to talk about them?”

“Mm.” Yusuf hums for a second, and quiet slips between them; he can hear the antique clock ticking on the second floor, thrumming through the dark house with more surety of a heartbeat.

He had been so happy a few minutes ago; he can be happy again.

“His name is Nicolo,” Yusuf says, and Booker nods expectantly. “I met him a few days ago at my office hours. Nile sent him my way for help on a translation.”

“Matchmaking?” Booker sounds amused, and honestly Yusuf finds Nile’s attempts to set him up charming as well (charming especially because it had worked). 

“Matchmaking,” Yusuf confirms, smiling warmly at the thought of her efforts. 

“Hang on.” Booker sounds less drunk now, fully teasing, his mood light like it is when he’s easy to like. “Is it that sexy Italian boy who was at Trumbull on Wednesday? Five foot ten, lovely Roman nose, eyes like sea glass?”

Still hovering between happiness and grief, Yusuf narrows his eyes at his brother in the dark. “How would you know that?”

“No reason. We … might be acquainted.” Booker’s eyes sparkle. “He has very broad shoulders.”

Yusuf stares at him, absolutely shocked (more than a little jealous), as Booker seems to stare out into the distance with fond nostalgia.

Then, he ducks his head and giggles. “Fuck, right after I was an asshole -- sorry, Joe.” He claps him on the shoulder. “I nearly took him out.”

Yusuf opens his mouth, and an indignant noise emerges.

“Shit! Phrasing!” Booker laughs again. “I mean, we ran into each other. Literally. It wasn’t a great day, even by my standards. He was very nice about it.”

“He is very nice,” Yusuf agrees, mollified by Booker’s clarification. “We got dinner.”

“And?” Booker smirks at his own implication.

“That’s it.” Yusuf picks at a stray thread coming out of his pocket. “Dinner.”

Booker blinks and checks the time, twisting his body around in the couch so his foot knocks into Yusuf’s shin; he shoves Booker harder than necessary before Booker turns back around.

“It’s not even midnight,” Booker points out, rudely baffled.

“I know.”

“And you’re here.” Booker squints into the darkness near the front door. “Is he here too?”

“No.”

“Did you leave him in bed?”

“No.” Yusuf sighs (only partly because he actually  _ really  _ wants Nicolo in bed, and he wants him to stay there, with him, in a situation that does not require the use of clothing). “It’s not … like that with him.”

“Oh?” Booker frowns. “You want the … what do they call it … the bromance?”

“I’m banning you from Twitter.”

“I need that for the memes!” Booker protests, holding his phone up, laughing when Yusuf swats at it. “Sorry, sorry. I only -- you were so happy when you came in. I wondered if you’d had an orgasm.”

“Book.” Yusuf groans and tilts his head back to the couch, smothering his face in a throw pillow.

“What? Two hundred years of friendship, and I cannot ask my friend if he has had an orgasm?”

Yusuf changes tactics and strong-arms the throw pillow over Booker’s face.

“Yield!” Booker’s voice, muffled, is cracked by giggles. “I yield!”

He’s still giggling when the pillow drops into his lap, and Yusuf is smiling again, actually smiling. It’s hard to be sensible, hard to wallow in the reality of the situation, when he can still feel the warm imprint of Nicolo’s lips against his.

“Not a bromance,” Yusuf mutters, wiping a hand down his face. “Very much -- romance. I want that, alright?” He wants everything, but he doesn’t say that.

“Alright.” Booker hums and lets it go for a second. 

In that moment, Yusuf’s phone buzzes, and he drags it out of his pocket, excited, to see if it’s Nicolo texting him. 

Even a  _ good night  _ might cause his heart to flutter out of his chest. 

(It’s been two days, he reminds himself. Two days with someone he barely knows, no matter how badly he wants to know him. He needs to get control over this)

It’s a text from Nile.

[11:59 PM]:  _ Guess who invited me over to talk about his wonderful evening! _

He’s about to respond when a photo comes through; interested, he taps in his passcode (changed every 24 hours, per Andy’s request), and opens the message chain.

It’s a photo of Nicolo. He nearly drops his phone in excitement.

(This is cheating! he thinks, Cheating because Nicolo does not know that Nile has known Yusuf for decades, cheating because he does not know who they are, cheating because Yusuf should earn photos of Nicolo on his phone, take them himself over time, over years and years of opportunities and dates and memories)

Nicolo is stretched out on a bed with a nondescript grey comforter; nondescript in that there are no patterns, no discernible quality to the material. That dark grey, however, brings out the color of Nicolo’s eyes in a way that is anything but nondescript. 

He’s smiling up at the camera, his hair slightly messy as though recently tousled, his mouth red with laughter, eyes sparkling behind the frames of his glasses, which Yusuf hasn’t seen him wear yet; his earring shines brightly, suggesting a light source over the bed; his sweater looks as warm and soft as it had on their date.

He’s smiling. 

Yusuf is very observant, and he’ll realize all those other details later, but in that first second, that’s the only thing he really notices: Nicolo is smiling.

Yusuf sighs and stares at the ceiling for a moment to give his eyes a break from the radiance of the phone screen. It’s odd: he hasn’t had a headache in centuries beyond the various quick-healing concussions, but there’s a strange, low buzzing in his skull. He breathes slowly to try and make it go away.

“He really is adorable,” Booker comments off-handedly, leaning over to see the photo. “I mean. If you’re into sexy Italian models.”

Yusuf chuckles, low and hoarse, wondering if it’d be inappropriate to show up outside Nicolo’s apartment in the morning with coffee.

Or maybe he can dig up one of his other poems, pretend that he discovered it. Nicolo might like it for his dissertation. They could talk about poetry for a few hours over coffee, after Nicolo reads another part of Yusuf’s soul so casually, looks into the crevasse of who he is, sees his fears, and handles them as graciously as he had tonight. 

They could talk about poetry all morning. And then kiss some more.

“I’m fucked,” Yusuf realizes, his voice more morose than he feels.

“Hey.” Booker pokes him in the side without any strength. “I thought we were working on negativity?”

Yusuf rolls his head over to give Booker a mildly deranged smile, forcing his voice to an upbeat vigor: “I’m fucked!”

“Better.”

* * *

“You love my space heater more than me,” Nicky accuses half-heartedly, grinning over at River who’s snuggled up near his tiny old heater.

“Guilty.” River smiles back unapologetically, and Nicky’s in too good of a mood to even pretend to want to tease her for another second. 

He snorts and collapses back onto the bed, giggling out of a low place in his stomach. 

“Dr. Jones was that charming, huh?” River asks, eyeing him with that same, knowing grin.

“More than charming. He was … he was …” Nicky holds his hands over his head as though painting on the ceiling. “An experience.”

“Did you kiss him?” 

Nicky blushes to the roots of his hair.

“You did!” River hops up on the bed, space heater abandoned. “You really did! Go Nicky!”

He laughs, too delighted to protest, and he doesn’t even complain when River snaps a photo of him as he smiles up at her.

“What’s that for?” He asks, in a deliriously nice place between sleepy and happy.

“For my album called  _ Nicky Smiled For More than Five Seconds, _ ” she informs him. “It’s a very small album.”

He snorts and scoots over when she swats at him to give her more space.

“When you two get married, I’d like to get a special shout-out,” River says, causing him to poke at her leg indignantly (because she has to be jinxing it! Has to be). She keeps typing something on her phone, and doesn’t even seem to notice that he poked her. “A toast, all to me, the person who told you to go see him!”

“You’ll get a toast right after the writer of that poem,” Nicky assures her, his eyes closing contentedly.

“Rude!”

“To the gay 13th century man who may or may not have found his happy ending,” Nicky continues, eyes still closed as he raises fake toast to the ceiling, “May he fabulously bless our gay union-”

“Ugh, I’m going to be glaring at you from the front row the whole time-”

“Front row?” Nicky cracks an eye at that and waves a hand dismissively. “No, no, no. You’ll be standing next to me.”

“I will?” Her smile is softer now. 

“Of course you will.” Nicky smiles up at her, sleepiness making him more honest than normal. “You’re my best friend, River Banks.”

She blinks, and it’s back again. That horrible wall of sadness he saw earlier today, the grief that curls out from inside of her sometimes, that awful, choking thing River hides so well in her smiles and lovely face. 

She blinks, and it’s gone again, but her smile is even softer than before. 

“Now you tell me that I’m your best friend,” Nicky informs her teasingly, trying to bring the mood back to something light.

River hums and pretends to think about it; Nicky chokes on feigned indignation.

“You’re definitely up there,” she assures him, patting him on the head the way you would pat a whining dog. “Right behind the barista at Philz.”

Nicky mumbles for a second before shrugging. “He does make very good cappuccino.”

More pats on the head. “Exactly.”

His eyes droop a little at the gentle touch as River starts to card her fingers through his hair. 

“I’m setting an alarm,” River informs him, reaching over to flick off his light and grab his phone from the dresser.

“Hm okay.” Nicky pauses at the edge of sleep. “But tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“And you promised to look over my paper for Wilson,” River says in a quiet sing-song voice. He mumbles in protest before remembering that he did, in fact, promise.

It’s nice, falling asleep with someone nearby. He wants to ask River if she minds staying all night, then thinks maybe it was implicit in her reminder to check her paper first thing in the morning.

“Goodnight,” he whispers to the darkness, smiling with a different kind of happiness from before when River settles in next to him, her back to his back. 

Her foot nudges his a little, and he nudges back. “Goodnight, Nicky.”

They fall asleep still touching.

* * *

(Three Weeks Later)

Nicky is sure he has the wrong address.

He looks up the block, and down the block, and back up the block. Looks at the front door of the townhouse. Looks at the address Joe sent him. 

No. This is right.

Somehow, Joe must have left out the part where he either made millions of dollars as an artist, or where he’s friends with someone incredibly wealthy who’s letting him live in one of the nicest houses Nicky has ever seen in DC.

He feels nervous now as he bounds up the steps and rings the doorbell; he wonders, distantly, if he should have brought something (flowers, bread, anything) when the door swings open to reveal Joe in a loose button-down.

“Come in, it’s fucking freezing.” Joe laughs and tugs Nicky inside quickly, kissing him on the cheek as he shivers and drips water onto the mat inside the door. “Here, let me take your coat-”

Nicky fumbles his arms out of the sleeves, eyes wide as he takes in the ceiling, the staircase, the art on the walls. 

“You have a beautiful home,” he blurts out, unable to keep it back, and Joe just laughs and gestures for him to follow like that doesn’t mean Nicky will be dripping city puddle water onto these beautiful hardwood floors.

“I’m only renting, but thank you,” Joe says calmly, sweeping into the open concept kitchen. 

Nicky stares up at the second floor, shivering a little still as he follows Joe.

“I thought we’d make pasta,” Joe says, gesturing at the ingredients laid out. “Nothing fancy, just a recipe I found.”

Nicky looks away from his intense study of the crown molding in the living room. “That sounds lovely.”

He has no idea how to say  _ this all sounds good because no one’s cooked dinner for me since my mother died, and you can’t know how much this feels like something I want to keep, how much I want this to be home, how much I want you to be home. _

(Because they’ve known each other for a month. And that would be ridiculous.)

“I also put together some dough, if you don’t mind waiting for the bread to bake.” Joe pulls out a tray of it from the fridge, poking at the cellophane with a strange energy.

Nerves.

Joseph Jones is nervous.

Nicky blinks about a hundred times before smiling, and he nods, going to the sink to wash up. “That all sounds perfect.”

“If you don’t like the bread, or the pasta, we can always order in-” Joe’s saying as Nicky comes back from the sink, wrists still damp. He kisses Joe on the jaw, a little lower than where Joe had kissed him, and Joe fumbles to a stop.

“Really, Joe,” Nicky says sincerely. “It sounds great. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Joe mumbles, ducking his head with a pleased smile.

The bread goes in the oven and Joe sets the timer for thirty minutes, and then they stand at the counter, awkwardly smiling at each other and not saying anything at all.

After three minutes have gone by, per the countdown, Joe gestures at his living room. “Would you like to -”

“Yes, please.” Nicky is grateful for the invitation to sit -- honestly, his legs have been aching since he went to a spin class at the student rec center. 

Thirty is much too close for comfort; Nicky’s getting old, and he worries that he’ll wake up with grey hair, one day soon.

(Maybe Joe will still like him when his hair is grey, he muses. Maybe he’ll think it’s cute when he has wrinkles. With Nicky’s luck, Joe will be incredibly sexy at forty, fifty, sixty. Nicky will go the way of his nonno and start shrinking by fifty-five)

They settle into the couch, Joe still buzzing with that same nervous energy, and he fidgets, glancing at the window that faces out into an alleyway, glancing at the door over his shoulder, and then back at his hands.

“Are you expecting someone else?” Nicky asks, confused but not wanting to be impolite. 

“No,” Joe laughs. “Not that that makes a difference, but no.”

“Oh.” Nicky assumes that something has been lost in translation, so he nods and smiles. “Okay.”

They’re quiet for another few seconds, and Nicky studies the living room, the furniture that smells like rich people, the nice plush rug, the fireplace.

(There are no photos of Joe. No photos of family. No trinkets beyond art on the walls and art stacked against walls and an easel in the corner. There is no sign that this is a home beyond the foyer of this house. It makes his chest ache. It makes him want to take a photo with Joe, so that he can have one nice photo to hang up. But Nicky doesn’t hang up photos of his family, either, and he does not want to be a hypocrite)

“Would you-” Nicky begins.

“Do you-” Joe says at the same time.

They laugh, sweet and shy, and look away for a second before Joe scoots towards him and taps his leg, gently. “You first.”

“No, no, it’s your home, you go first,” Nicky challenges, and they smile some more before Joe nods and gestures at the kitchen.

“Do you want some wine?”

Nicky frowns. “I don’t need to drink,” he says, worried that Joe went out and bought alcohol just for him. “You’re very kind to offer.”

“It’s not --” Joe ducks his head. “My friend, Sebastien -- he leaves it lying around sometimes. So really I’m offering his wine. Not very kind.”

“Finder keeper,” Nicky says serenely, sure he didn’t quite get that right, but not really caring.

Everything in him is buzzing again, and he doesn’t know why. It isn’t making him anxious; quite the opposite. He just feels … right.

“Your turn,” Joe says.

“I was going to say, would you like to make out a little to pass time,” Nicky says, still thinking about how his whole body tingles with excited happiness when he’s near Joe.

Then, what he says catches up to him, and Nicky’s eyes widen. 

“I mean -- shit, shit,” he debates jumping out the bay window, decides it’s much too nice of a window, “um, I was - I was kidding-”

“That’s too bad,” Joe says, smirking a little as he leans closer; his eyes are very brown, very warm, very beautiful. Nicky’s brain skips like an old record. 

“It is?” He’s aware that there’s less than a foot of space between them now.

“Mhm,” Joe nods, his eyes drifting lazily to Nicky’s mouth and then back up to his eyes. He swears he can feel it like physical touch, and his shoulders tremble a little.

“Oh,” Nicky says, more breath than sound, as he nods in answer to a question Joe hasn’t said aloud yet. “I mean--”

They’re kissing a second later, Joe’s hand soft on his jaw before it slips to the back of his head, fingers sliding between strands of hair as he pulls him closer.

Nicky’s hand curls uselessly on Joe’s chest (not useless, not at all, because Joe’s chest is firm and warm and he can feel his heartbeat, strong and sure and real, so real, because this isn’t a dream), and his lips part as he gasps at the shock of emotion that comes from being so close to Joe.

If it was a dream, it would be perfect -- Nicky would pull Joe down to the couch, and they’d move together in sync down to their breath, and they’d moan quietly and there’d be a fade to black before anything too human happened.

It’s not a dream: Nicky’s long legs knock into Joe’s feet as they fumble backwards to the couch with Nicky pulling and Joe pushing. Their teeth clack together a little as Joe settles over Nicky’s chest, and Nicky isn’t quite sure what to do with his tongue when Joe licks into his mouth -- but it feels incredible, and he decides to push his thinking-all-the-time brain to the back of his mind and focus on the way Joe’s hands are hot and firm as they run up and down his arms before cradling his head again.

Their feet slide together, and Nicky giggles a little because the arch of his foot has always been ticklish. “Sorry,” Joe whispers into his mouth, his fingers gliding over Nicky’s pulse point. 

He jumps a little at the contact, and Joe laughs softly, ducking his head to chase the shiver, his tongue flicking over Nicky’s pulse before he kisses it, drawing an embarrassing moan that sounds like the warble of a drunk seal out of Nicky’s throat.

“Joe,” he mutters, mortified, wanting it to stop (his embarrassment) and wanting it to never end (the way Joe’s touching him).

“Nicolo,” Joe breathes, “Nicolo--”

He pulls back, and in the soft light from the lamp, Nicky can see that Joe’s face is strangely vulnerable, open and sad and aching. He wants to kiss it away; he reaches up to Joe’s shirt to tug him back down and do exactly that, but Joe clasps his hand to his chest, holds it there over his heartbeat.

“Nicolo,” Joe says, eyes wet. “Please. Call me Yusuf.”

“Yusuf?” Nicolo repeats, eyes widening for a moment before he smiles. 

Joe nods. “It’s -- it’s my real name, it’s-- I want you to call me Yusuf, at least when we’re like this.”

“Yusuf,” Nicolo says again, softer when Joe sighs and leans back down, goes back to kissing his neck. “Yusuf,” softer still when Joe sucks behind his ear, making his back arch and hips tilt. “Yusuf--” he’ll be chanting it soon, but hell, Nicky hasn’t prayed in years, and this seems like a good way to get back in practice, nothing holier than this--

Joe’s fingers fumble with the edge of his shirt, and Nicky tenses, just a little. Joe pulls away, eyes dark with concern now.

“Sorry,” he says, “I should have--”

“I’m a virgin,” Nicky blurts out before Joe can finish the apology, so Joe doesn’t think he did something wrong. He  _ liked  _ what Joe did. He really did. He wants him to repeat it. 

(Oh God. Oh fuck. He just -- he told him -- oh God)

“You’re a--” Joe’s face is very lively; his eyes are always full of light and mirth and he can banter better than anyone Nicky’s ever met, in English or Italian (or French or Arabic too, he’d imagine).

He’s stalled now. Paused. Eyes wide, shocked.

It fades quickly, but Nicky winces all the same and takes his hands off of Joe and uses them to cover his face.

_ Smiting would be excellent,  _ he tells God casually, the same tone he’d use for an old, somewhat abandoned penpal.  _ If you could just -- a lightning bolt. Maybe a tornado. Fiery explosion. Anything. I’d go for a pillar of salt, if you want. But. Please. Smite now. _

“Nicolo.”

Nicky does not emerge from behind his hands.

“Nicolo.” Closer this time, and he can feel the weight of Joe moving over him. Kisses start to rain down over the backs of his hands, his wrists. “Nicolo, look at me.”

_ Still waiting,  _ he thinks to God.  _ At your leisure. _

“Nico,” Joe murmurs, his nose gently skimming along his forearm, along the back of his hand. “Nico, please.”

It’s the nickname, soft and fragile and  _ almost  _ loving in Joe’s voice that has him lowering his hands. They’re spared any further awkwardness when the timer goes off -- they’d been kissing for a lot longer than Nicky had thought.

They stand up, and Nicky tries to smooth out the nice shirt he’d put on, the only one with no stains that had been washed recently, and he joins Joe in the kitchen as the fresh bread pops out of the oven, golden and lovely and smelling so good. 

“Do you want to start dinner now, or do you want to wait?”

“Wait,” Nicky says, wanting this evening to go as long as possible. “If that’s okay with you.”

“Of course.” Joe’s smile is as warm and miraculous as ever, so Nicky hopes he hasn’t ruined everything.

They sit at the small dining table this time, a glass of water in front of both of them, the beautiful loaf of bread between them. They don’t make small talk as they sit down, and Joe goes right back to the sore spot, or at least, near it.

“Why did you hide before?” Joe asks, gesturing to the couch. 

“Because it’s embarrassing,” Nicky mutters. 

“I don’t see how.”

“I’m twenty-seven, twenty-eight after the New Year.” Nicky rubs his temple and stares at his glass to avoid Joe’s eyes. “It’s embarrassing.” He remembers to add, “I liked what we were doing. I was ... nervous. That’s all.”

“Well, that’s good. Nervous doesn’t mean terrible,” Joe says, almost as though talking to himself.

Nicky smiles at him. “It definitely wasn’t terrible.”

“It’s been a while since I did something like that,” Joe admits, and Nicky is truly shocked. “So, I guess I was nervous too, that I’d forgotten how.”

“Forgotten?” Nicky splutters. “Definitely not. No. How long has it been?”

“Since something like this? Or sex?” Joe shakes his head, his features settling. “Forty-five years,” Joe deadpans, his eyes impossibly serious as he looks at Nicky.

Nicky stares at him before snorting and grabbing his water. “You have a great poker face, Joe.”

“Yeah.” Joe’s voice is oddly quiet. “I guess I do.”

“Anyway.” He’s less quiet now, “it’s been a while for me. How about you? Would it be rude if I asked you about your partners?”

“I haven’t had any,” Nicky answers truthfully. “No boyfriends. No partners.”

“I find that very hard to believe.” Joe shakes his head wonderingly and trails his fingers around the rim of his glass; Nicky tries not to get too focused on it. 

“Why?”

“Look at you.” Joe waves a hand at him and sits back, scoffing when Nicky’s look of doubt doesn’t vanish. “You’re beautiful, Nicolo.”

“Thanks.” Nicky mumbles, mostly to the table. “And, there hasn’t exactly been a line of people waiting.”

“Because you were studying to be a priest?” Joe guesses, and Nicky winces slightly. “Shit. Sorry, I know you don’t like to talk about it.”

“I don’t,” Nicky agrees, glad that Joe’s picked up on it, glad that he isn’t asking why that is. “And yes. Partly. But that was only three years of my life. Before that, it was the fact that I was a closeted Catholic kid. No sex, and definitely no sex with men.”

“When did you leave the seminary?” 

“Three years ago.”

“That’s three years where you could take what I’m sure is a  _ considerable  _ number of people up on their romantic attempts to woo you.”

“Woo me?” Nicky laughs when Joe only nods earnestly while reaching for his water. “I’m a PhD candidate! I barely have the energy to brush my teeth, how could I possibly have the energy to fuck someone?”

Joe, who’d been very smoothly sipping from his water, chokes on the word  _ fuck,  _ and Nicky’s rant winds down a little so he can grin. He feels mischievous. 

“What?” He asks.

“Nothing,” Joe coughs a little and sets his glass down before wiping his mouth. “Nothing.”

“Is it that I said the word  _ fuck _ ?” Nicky murmurs, leaning forward over the table. 

He has no idea who he is right now. It’s like he’s watching his life on the screen of his laptop, some Netflix show about a twentysomething virgin who still manages to flirt with sexy, smart professors and doesn’t even blush or stammer to do it.

(He’s going to regret this later. He is going to stare at his ceiling all night, eyes wide, before he fumbles to kneel and beg for forgiveness to someone who stopped listening a long time ago)

“Hm?” Nicky keeps going, smirking when Joe meets his eyes. “Are you surprised, that a nice Catholic boy would say  _ fuck  _ like that-”

“Nicolo.” Joe doesn’t lean forward; he leans back, eyes full of something that zips along Nicky’s spine. A warning. An invitation. He isn’t sure. “Keep talking like that, and I’m going to invite you into my bed. And I won’t want you to leave until morning.”

He doesn’t change his voice like Nicky had; he says it like Joe always talks, confident, sincere. 

Nicky thinks his face is on fire.

“Oh.” He nods and takes a sip of water, whatever sexual confidence (mania, maybe) that had previously possessed him flooding out of him at once, leaving him dry-mouthed and trembling. “Yes. That sounds … nice.”

“Don’t worry, Nicolo,” Joe murmurs after Nicky’s out of water. “I plan to take my time with you.”

Somehow that makes him shiver worse than before.

A minute later, Joe allows Nicky the escape route of preparing dinner, and they switch -- strangely effortless, but it always is with Joe -- to boiling the pasta and stirring arrabbiata sauce, laughing and tasting things off of spoons, kissing away sauce from corners of mouths and fingers.

Nicky’s laughing as he takes the knife from Joe to cut some garlic for the sauce after he declares that it’s sorely lacking in it.

“There’s already two full cloves, Nicolo,” Joe protests, laughing as well while Nicky tsks and smashes another clove under the knife. 

“I knew you could not be perfect,” Nicky says solemnly, meeting Joe’s eyes for a long moment. “And now I know. You do not understand the importance of garlic.”

“I think I understand garlic plenty well, Nicolo--”

Nicky pretends to heave another sigh, and he’s still smiling at Joe when he starts to dice, which is probably how he digs the point of the blade into his index finger.

“Cazzo,” he swears immediately, snatching his hand away from the board. “Stronzo, cazzo, cazzo-- ugh!” Nicky groans as he waves his hand, not wanting to look at the blood. 

“Nicolo!”

“It’s fine,” he mutters, walking to the sink. “Shit, sorry for bleeding everywhere..” 

Joe beats him to the sink and turns on the water; he’s incredibly serious as he examines Nicky’s hand, and it makes him feel better, that Joe is taking his injury seriously. He’d feel even more embarrassed if he looked down to discover the equivalent of a paper cut.

“Tell me how bad it is,” Nicky says grimly.

“You don’t need stitches, but it is pretty deep,” Joe says, his hands gripping Nicky’s as he examines it.

“No.” Nicky shakes his head, smiling when Joe looks up from his wound. “No, I meant: tell me if the garlic survived.”

It makes Joe laugh, but not as much as Nicky had been expecting. It looks like Joe is legitimately upset that he cut himself.

“I’ll be fine,” he promises, the sharp sting now reduced to a dull, achy throb. “Really. Do you have a bandaid, maybe?”

Joe straightens up, half-turns, and then curses vividly. “No, I -- I don’t have bandaids.” He drags his hands through his curly hair, and Nicky frowns at the strange demonstration of self-directed anger on Joe’s face.

“It’s just a bandaid,” he tries to say, leaning into Joe’s line of sight. “Hey. Yusuf.”

That catches his attention, and Joe’s eyes flick back to his, the sadness not quite gone. 

“I’m fine,” Nicky promises, holding up his hand. It’s stopped bleeding, at least. “Maybe I should let you finish dinner.”

Joe sucks in a nervous breath and nods; Nicky leans in and kisses him sweetly, trying to communicate how incredibly fine he is, and Joe kisses him back after two very nerve-wracking seconds.

When they eat, Joe’s eyes can’t leave the cut on Nicky’s finger; he can’t make heads or tails of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh oh, can't imagine what Joe was thinking.
> 
> The next chapter moves the time/pacing up a little: Nicky and Joe talk a little bit about Nicky's issues with the church (we see a lot more of it from his perspective), Joe struggles with falling in love with someone who can get hurt and bleed and die (we saw a little preview of that, maybe), and their relationship develops even more while shadows lurk at the edge of their romance!
> 
> Also, I want to say with a FAIR bit of warning that this fic will get very, very dark at points. Not only will we see the violence from the prologue, but Nicky's history is also imbued with violence, and so is Joe's (I guess more obviously on Joe's part, given canon!). I'll give you all a fair heads up before things get REALLY rocky/triggering, as always, and I'll try to make a note before the chapter before the Prologue Scene/Context happens so you can duck out and pretend that this is a fluffy modern meet cute!!!
> 
> Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts, get your musings, and listen to any collective rage/excitement/joy/questions!!! Thank you for reading!


	4. Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christmas isn't easy for Nicky, and a series of disasters around the season make it even more challenging than normal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO!
> 
> 1\. yes the chapter count did go up, and it's tentative at 8 because it's most likely going to be 10 please don't hate me  
> 2\. this chapter is (I think?) the shortest one so far, but it's still about 5000 words and honestly it's a very emotionally draining chapter, so short might be better for right now  
> 3\. The angst is really getting started now
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Panic attack (Nicky POV) and self-loathing/anger as a result  
> Angst and grief surrounding Christmas/Catholicism  
> Head injury
> 
> (Joe POV) violence, canon-typical  
> Violence against children (referenced, not depicted)  
> References to human trafficking (children)

* * *

Nicky shivers a little and tugs his scarf up to protect his chin more; the second week of December has brought an early sharp cold to DC. The sidewalk is icy in patches, and snow litters the small patches of dirt and grass that border the sidewalks. 

Storefronts are already plastered in Christmas decorations, and he tries not to look at them head-on. It’s a constant, painful barrage that he can’t escape from. 

Luckily, River’s with him, tugging him along as she searches out this one place where she swears she once ate a burger so good she saw the face of God; they’re only a half block away from campus (and a block away from Joe’s house, his brain unhelpfully, unnecessarily supplies), and he tries to figure out how to tell River if she can’t find it, it’s probably not here to begin with. 

Something strikes him, in the middle of River’s now mildly pornographic description of how good the burger was. Something odd.

“River,” he says, interrupting her when she keeps going on and on about this hole-in-the-wall that she _knows_ was right here. “River.” He comes to a stop and tugs on her hand, drawing her to face him.

“What?” She asks, still laughing from her own description of the world’s best burger.

“Was the place -- was it called Greasy Gus?”

“Yeah!” River claps her hands and laughs. “Oh my god, let’s pull it up on Yelp!”

“River.” Nicky frowns at her thoughtfully. “I always ate there with friends when I was in high school.”

“And it was amazing, right?”

“Yes.” Nicky rubs his neck, trying to think. “Um. River, that place went out of business almost ten years ago?”

She stares at him for a long second, her expression unreadable, and then she shrugs. “Maybe it was a different place.”

“Probably,” Nicky laughs. “Weren’t you in Chicago ten years ago?”

“What?”

“You grew up in Chicago,” Nicky clarifies, frowning now. “Or -- or shit, did I … did I get that wrong?”

Her body stiffens for a second and then she shakes her head. “No. No, you’re right, Nicky.” She looks down the street, and he worries that she’s still seeking out this probably nonexistent spot.

“I know what you’re doing,” he says gently.

Her body language doesn’t relax. “Oh?”

“Yeah. And it’s sweet.” That gets her attention; she turns to him, frowning. “You’re trying to distract me from … The Incident.”

River lifts an impeccable eyebrow. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

He groans and puts a hand to his head; they start walking again as Nicky laments to the unlistening Heavens. “What else should I call sobbing on the shoulder of the man I’m dating? God, he thinks I’m an idiot.”

“Jo- _nes,_ ” River clears her throat in the middle of his name, “definitely doesn’t think you’re an idiot. If he has any common sense, he doesn’t.”

“I cried,” Nicky repeats dully. “A lot. In the middle of a panic attack. A real one. Big time.” He shivers, not just from the cold. “He had to get me water, and held my hands, and--”

“So, he acted like your boyfriend?” River nudges him with her elbow. “Didn’t think you’d be upset about that--”

“He shouldn’t have to take care of me,” Nicky argues stiffly, crossing his arms in front of his chest as they start to meander back to campus. “I’m a full grown adult.”

“Even adults need some help sometimes,” River says. “Even you ... Even me.”

Nicky tries to think of a situation where River, cool, calm, hilarious, lovable River would ever need someone to help her, and then shrugs. They’ve only been friends for a year and change, so maybe she’s hinting at something he doesn’t know about or hasn’t seen yet.

“Besides,” she continues, “he’s probably just worried about his boyfriend, and isn’t sure if you’re up for company. That’s why he hasn’t texted.”

“Mhm.” Nicky knows he doesn’t sound like he believes River in the least, but he doesn’t feel like arguing again. Honestly, he’s exhausted.

He’s been exhausted for two days, since the full-on, staggering panic attack that had caught him off-guard in front of Joe. They’d been walking down Connecticut, kind of like this, and they’d passed by the manger scene in front of St. Matthew’s.

Nicky had made the mistake of looking (and _why_ did he look? He knew what it was, he knew the figures that would be in it, knew that if he looked slightly to the east, he’d see the three kings approaching the manger, nudged slightly every day by the groundskeeper to draw nearer to the as-of-yet empty trough.)

He’d looked anyway because Joe had stopped to check his phone for something, and they were right in front of the church, and he’d looked down and seen the peaceful expression on Maria’s face. He’d seen the hopeful trust on San Giuseppe’s face, he’d seen the sheep and the angel and the star shining above the little shelter. 

There was no service at the time, and yet he had been able to smell incense burning. He could smell the aging wood of pews and hear the creak of the kneelers as the worshipping drew together to celebrate Communion. From the corner of his mind he never poked at, he could hear distant strains of music, organ piped through the scar tissue of his memory as though he’d never tucked it away to begin with:

_Adeste fideles læti triumphantes,_

_Venite, venite in Bethlehem._

Nicky had swallowed, and mis-paced his breathing. Joe was still typing something on his phone, talking now about some sort of art show that was happening a mile or so away, and _did Nicky want an Uber?_

Nicky had been able to taste iron in the back of his mouth, cloying and heavy against his teeth; sound rushed in his ears as he stared at the empty manger, absent of anything but scraps of hay. He remembered a different Christmas, a different Advent, four years ago now. The choir had been rehearsing at the time when he’d shattered that part of his life irrevocably, rehearsing so innocently, so ignorantly, for the midnight Mass where he was to serve for the first time as Deacon; the organ flowed from practiced hands, covering up the sound of what was left of his soul breaking, a sound that was suspiciously like bone.

“--Nicolo?”

Joe’s hand had been at his elbow then, dragging him out of the disintegrating memory, and Nicky’s breath had still not been corrected.

He had shaken his head, unable to blink, unable to look away from the manger. 

“Nicolo, hey. Nicolo, look at me.” Joe had continued to murmur, trying to turn him away gently, and then Nicky took a gasp of air that sounded unmistakably like a sob.

Joe had murmured something then in Arabic, something he didn’t know the meaning of, a flow of comforting tone and gentle vowel where the word _habibi_ floated to the surface, a word Nicky had heard more than once by that point. He was too far gone in his mind to wonder at its meaning.

“Nicolo.” Nicky had blinked and realized they were down the block, St. Matthew’s out of sight. “Nico, I’m so sorry, I did not realize.”

He had been hyperventilating, the world shaking around him, his heart thundering in his chest as he struggled to take breath. Joe had taken his hand and put it to his chest, trying to coach him through breaths, and Nicky tried to follow, but the fear wouldn’t lessen, the anger and the shame and the terror too big to name. Joe had kissed his eyelids, his nose brushing over his cheeks and forehead and nose, until drawing him down the street to his apartment where he’d brought him to bed, pulled the covers around him, encouraged him to drink water, and then held him, kissing his shoulder as he shook and shuddered until falling into a dreamless, heavy sleep.

Joe had been gone when he woke up -- he had class, Nicky rationalizes now in the present, he’d had to leave, and he’d left a note -- and he hasn’t texted him beyond a _good morning, Nico,_ since.

“Let’s get pizza,” River offers. “My treat.”

She’s still trying to distract him, but he actually doesn’t mind the distraction too terribly. It’s better than sitting in bed, staring blankly at poetry that rattles around his brain and doesn’t go anywhere.

“Pizza,” he agrees quietly.

“You must be exhausted; you never agree to American pizza.”

“You all just … it’s so cheesy,” Nicky says, shaking himself a little to get rid of the cobwebs cluttering his brain. “There’s … there’s _pineapple_ on it.”

“Only when it’s delicious.”

They settle into the familiar debate, and Nicky’s almost forgotten the disastrous week he’s had, well and truly distracted by River’s opinions on pineapple pizza. Then, because of course:

Nicky steps on a patch of black ice only two hundred yards from the pizza place and wipes out spectacularly, not able to brace himself because he’d crammed his chilly hands in the pockets of his jeans.

Right before his head hits the pavement, Nicky thinks _oh, fuck you, you asshole_ as strongly as he can at himself in Italian.

The world goes jarringly black as air and all sense are knocked out of him.

Into the darkness, an angelic voice issues, and it sounds angry, concerned. They’re arguing with another voice -- a different angel, maybe -- and Nicky tries to focus on it through the throb of _ouch_ that’s rocking through him.

Light comes back slowly, and he realizes his eyes are closed; something or someone is holding his head up, and the two voices of angels lock into place in his awareness so he realizes that it’s River, and oddly enough, Joe. 

_Did they know each other?_

He hears snippets of dialogue as the world continues to roar around him, the words distant and distorted, barely landing in his mind for him to comprehend. 

“--when you said _emergency with Nicky,_ I thought you were hyperbolizing to get me to come see you two, Nile--”

Nicky moans, or at least tries too -- reality still swims around him, points of logic escaping him. Clearly he’s not all there because who the hell is Nile? He has no idea what’s happening. Something terrible lances up his spine, into his shoulder.

_Ouch._

“I didn’t think _this_ would happen, but thank God you were right fucking there--”

“What, so I could watch him bleed on the sidewalk myself? Yes, really reassuring, little sister, so very reassuring--”

“Joe?” Nicky mumbles, the world still dark. “Joe is that-”

The angels stop arguing. 

“How do you feel, sweetheart?” Joe brushes nervous fingers over his temples, and Nicky groans. “You hit your head pretty hard-”

“Why are you here?” He asks, confused as to why he’s on the ground. “Why am I--”

“You fell,” River reported. “And luckily, J- Dr. Jones was nearby, and he helped me move you off the sidewalk.”

“Shit,” Nicky mumbles. _So embarrassing._

There’s a beautiful, soft noise that barely disturbs the pounding in his head. Joe’s laughing.

“Not that embarrassing, habibi.”

_He said that out loud._

“Yeah, you did.” River laughs too, and then Nicky opens his eyes. He immediately regrets it because even through the heavy cloud cover over DC, it’s really fucking bright.

“Ouch,” he reports, and River smiles at him. Joe’s fingers still touch his forehead gently, here and there, and when he shifts, Joe helps him sit up, very slowly.

“I think you have a concussion,” Joe reports, looking into his eyes. Normally, that would make Nicky’s heart skip a couple beats, but right now, Joe just swims before his eyes.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Nicky mutters.

“Well, that’s great,” River teases. 

They work together to get Nicky to his feet, and he retches a little as the world tosses sideways. His legs shake miserably, and even the bedlam in his brain, he manages to think _well this isn’t going to make me look any more normal to perfect, beautiful Yusuf._

“You’ve had a concussion before?” Joe asks worriedly.

Nicky nods. “I was in … a sword fighting group. As a kid.” He groans and puts a hand to his head, wincing at tenderness.

“I’d like to see that one day,” Joe says warmly, and Nicky nods, and then whines at how gross nodding feels. 

“I was a medic when I was younger,” Joe says as he and River work together to guide him towards his building, or at least, he assumes that’s where they’re going. “And I can say pretty confidently that you have a concussion, so you need a hospital, just in case.”

“No.” Nicky pales more at the thought, feeling the blood rush around his body uncomfortably. “No. My insurance … no. Please.”

“Nicolo--”

“You can watch him overnight, _Doctor Jones,_ ” River says with strange steel in her voice. “Make sure he’s okay, use that medical background of yours--”

 _Huh._ Nicky wonders if they’ve met frequently in the past; he doesn’t think most people would use a scolding tone with Joe.

“Alright.” 

After that, it’s pretty quiet, other than Joe’s urgent, gentle questions murmured in his ear, and River’s half-hearted teasing as he nearly trips again going up the steps. Mortifyingly, Joe scoops him up the last few feet and simply carries him up the stairs to his apartment; he looks over Joe’s shoulder, his feet banging awkwardly against the wall, to see River giving him two big thumbs’ up as she nods encouragingly. 

“Guh,” Nicky mutters, burying his face in Joe’s shoulder. “I’m too big for you to carry, Joe.”

“And yet, I’m carrying you.” 

“Ugh.” Nicky winces as he’s set back down on his feet, and he spends a few seconds or eons wondering how on _earth_ Joe was able to carry him for so long, considering they’re roughly the same size. 

Joe gets him into bed -- the second time in 48 hours, great, that’s great, maybe he died when he hit his head, and now he’s in Hell or Purgatory.

Joe pauses from where he’s fussing with the blankets. “What did you say?” He asks quietly, his eyes burning with something that Nicky’s in way too much pain to read.

“I said it out loud.” Nicky groans and shakes his head. (Unbeknownst to him, he’s fallen back into Italian, but Joe’s responding as though nothing has changed, so he won’t realize until morning). “I said I’m in Hell. Because I died.”

“You …” Joe trails off, his hands twitching slightly.

He does something very odd, or maybe Nicky thinks it’s odd because his head is fucked. He leans forward, hands running and skimming along the sore parts of his skull; Nicky hisses and flinches away from it quickly. 

“Still hurts?” Joe asks warily, staring at him with that same intense look from before.

“Hurts,” Nicky confirms, rubbing his neck.

“And it’s already been twenty minutes,” Joe mutters to himself. Nicky frowns: why would that matter? Concussions don’t heal in twenty minutes. 

To Nicky, he says, “You aren’t dead.”

“Probably.” Nicky winces as he tries to sit back. “Fuck. Feels like it, though.”

Joe’s smile is tight, but Nicky doesn’t notice. “Try to get some rest. I’ll sit here to make sure you’re okay.”

“Maybe we can finish watching--”

“No screens until we’re sure you’re okay,” Joe says sternly. 

Nicky pouts, or at least he tries to until the expression hurts his head even more. “But I … what if I get bored?” He nudges Joe a little. “Would you tell me a story?”

Joe leans back and studies his face, and Nicky gives his best approximation of the smile that River declared ‘so adorable it should be a felony,’ or at least the version of it when he’s concussed. It works: Joe smiles back and then nods.

He proceeds to tell a long, winding story about a man who met Shakespeare and was so irritated by his endless flirting that he tore up a manuscript that’s forever lost to time. Joe tells the story well, vividly, as though they were both there and watching it, and Nicky laughs until his head hurts too bad to laugh; he falls asleep with his hand curled in Joe’s, their shoulders pressed up against each other as Joe continues to talk.

Nicky’s last thought was: _I’m never going to love anyone the way I love him._

And then a softer darkness from before sweeps him away from the thought before he fully realizes that it’s the first time he’s admitted to himself that he’s in love with Joe Jones.

* * *

“Cheer up.” Andy tells him from where she’s standing in front of him, twisting around to smirk at him. “We’ll be back by Thursday.”

Yusuf shoots her a glare and adjusts his grip on the bar above his head as they drive through the night in the back of a truck, the three of them swaying as Booker drives down dark roads.

They’re in Belgium, on a job Booker had told them about at the last second, and they’re driving out of the city to find where a group of girls has supposedly been stashed. Booker had gotten the call through a contact, former CIA, and they’re hopefully going to arrive in time to save these girls before they disappear again, as well as gather intel to bring down the leader in this particular ring of human traffickers.

Yusuf closes his eyes as the truck rocks back and forth over the bumpy rural roads, and tries not to think too hard about what he’s missing as he’s away.

Nicolo has been better since his head injury -- he’s never going to forget how he looked, pale and lifeless, slumped against Nile when he came across them a minute after he fell -- but it’s not the lingering side effects of his concussion that has Yusuf antsy to go home.

It’s the fact that tomorrow (really today, if the clock on the dashboard is accurate) is Christmas, and Nicolo is entirely alone.

(He’d been so accepting when Yusuf had told him regretfully that he had sudden plans that he had to see through in Europe, so calm, _“you don’t celebrate it, Joe, it’s really fine, I wouldn’t have wanted to bother you with it anyway”_ ; it had shattered his heart when Nicolo had said with a sweet optimism, _River stayed on campus last year, so we’ll probably spend the day together!_ ”)

Nile shifts in the seat next to him and touches his knee; he’d been bouncing it rapidly without realizing. She gives him a kind smile before looking back out the window, her hands gripping the barrel of her gun with an air of terrifying competence. Yusuf’s hand drifts to his own guns, strapped to his shoulder and hip, and then to his saif on the other hip.

He’s been on edge since their brief meeting with Copley two days ago, over in Paris with the bleak winter sun shining down on them. Copley had given them the details, Yusuf and Andy sitting in the open air cafe with them, Nile keeping them in her sights from up in her sniper’s perch, Booker keeping an eye out on the ground traffic, and then he’d smiled tiredly at Yusuf.

“Bring these girls home,” he’d said softly, worrying at the wedding ring on his left hand. His fingers had never left the jewelry, now that Yusuf thinks about it. “They need to come home. You understand that, correct?”

Yusuf had only nodded, wanting to shout _we’ll do it for free_ as Andy negotiated the price, and then they’d left to gather their weapons and develop a plan before leaving the city. 

“We’re here,” Andy announces, breaking his train of thought as the truck comes to a stop at the side of the road. 

They exit quietly and quickly, fanning out as they enter an empty field, walking towards the compound on foot. Andy sends them quick signals as they near the house, and Nile melts away into the shadows towards the north entrance to catch any stragglers. Andy’s next signal sends Booker to a set of doors in the ground, a storm cellar that’s where the girls are being kept. 

If he focuses, Yusuf thinks he can hear the distant sound of sobbing. He tightens his grip on his saif and pulls it from its sheath. 

Andy signals to him to have her six, and he moves forward with purpose, all thoughts of _home_ and Nicolo’s beautiful eyes and laugh and smile and touch fading away so that he can become the nightmare of wicked men, so he can fulfill the purpose of their team.

It’s Andy who strikes first after kicking the door in; her labrys flashes through the air and kills two men near the entrance immediately. Then, the shouting and gunfire -- Yusuf catches two bullets to the shoulder and hip, swings his saif up and cuts the first shooter down before his muscles have even spat the bullet back out.

Blood splatters the walls, some of it his, some of it Andy’s. Most of it isn’t.

They’ll have to burn the house when they’re done to cover their tracks, but Yusuf isn’t thinking about that right now. He covers Andy’s back, and kills six more men before even pulling his gun out. The blade through the chest of the man approaching from his right, a bullet through the eye of a man to his left. 

Some try to run out the back, screaming about demons when Andy and Yusuf don’t die despite dozens of bullets entering their bodies; more screaming echoes into the house as they meet with Nile. Andy and Yusuf clear the house, bodies building up around them, and finally, when there doesn’t seem to be anyone left, they stumble across a laptop which Andy boots up.

Yusuf snorts when he sees a post-it attached to the keyboard; he points it out, and Andy laughs too, blood smeared over her cheekbone, as she types in the password that had been scrawled out on the keyboard. A few minutes later, and she’s downloaded all the information on the laptop to a flash drive and tucked it away in her pocket.

As they walk towards the exit, Yusuf sees a man twitching on the ground; remembering some of the images that had flashed across the screen as Andy had downloaded it, he lifts his gun and shoots the man in the head without looking, full, sickening fury coursing through him.

There are fourteen girls huddled around Booker, the oldest among them sobbing to him in French. He speaks kindly and calmly, bouncing a girl no older than seven on his knee as he gathers a few more close to him, talking gently of plans to take them to the hospital, to find their parents again. 

Some of the girls look terrified and confused, and Yusuf kneels and hopes the blood on his clothing and face won’t terrify them further (then he remembers that it’s night, and there’s no moon, so they probably can’t see what he just did), and addresses the group in Dutch, in case any of them are from the north. 

Two girls perk up at the familiar language and tell him their names, where they’re from, how long they think they’ve been here. He asks painful questions and tries not to get sick when he gets painful answers, and Andy sits wearily and tries to get two girls, eastern European if Yusuf’s correct, to say anything at all.

“We should go,” Nile says quietly, coming back out of the house.

“Is everything set?” Booker asks, looking up from the girl he’s cradling with surprise.

“Used one of your detonators and everything,” she answers, beaming at him; Booker looks terribly proud to have Nile set up a bomb he built, but then he nods and stands, four girls hanging off of his jacket.

“It’s one of my bombs, so it won’t fail. We need to clear the area,” he says gruffly.

They manage to get the girls through the fields, a few of them chattering to Nile now in a blend of Spanish and English, and when they get to the truck, the girls quiet, a few of them holding back with wide eyes.

“It’s safe,” Yusuf promises them. “We’ll get in the back with you. We just need to get you to safety.”

Booker climbs in first and holds his hand out to the nearest child; after another moment of hesitation, she climbs in behind them. Nile hops up and starts passing out blankets, packets of food, hand warmers. Yusuf keeps an eye on the group as they load into the back of the truck, and he prays that they will survive this, that their spirits will not be too broken by what they’ve seen and what’s been done to them.

The house explodes in the near distance, lighting up like a beacon against the night sky. 

“Fireworks on Christmas,” Andy mutters, tossing her labrys in its case to the back of the truck. 

The oldest girl is watching the fire lick at the stars, and Yusuf comes to her with a thick blanket and a bottle of water. He watches her, worried that the explosion might be a bit too much on top of the considerable horrors she’s already experienced, but she looks at him with steel in her eyes and nods, once.

“Good,” she says. Then, she takes the blanket and water with a nod of thanks and shuffles to the truck.

Yusuf feels as though he weighs a thousand pounds, after. 

He wonders how the plane can carry their weight as they fly back to America, Booker curled up around an in-flight glass of whisky, Nile propped up against Andy as she snores with an open mouth. Yusuf stares out the window, down at the ink of the Atlantic, and tries not to think of much of anything.

They land at IAD and tumble off the plane; Booker melts into the crowd, winking at them before he vanishes through a different lane at Customs. Nile sticks with Yusuf, and Andy walks with them to the door before heading off towards a rented car with blacked out windows, saying something about Boston. 

_Don’t spend the new year searching for her,_ Yusuf wants to say. _Quynh would understand if you needed to rest._

He doesn’t say anything, only kisses Andy on the cheek and holds her delicately before she goes to Nile and gives her a similar embrace.

“Merry Christmas, kid,” Andy murmurs into the chilly air over Nile’s shoulder, and Nile snorts and mutters it back before Andy’s gone, the car pulling away from the curb and into the mess of traffic accumulating outside of Arrivals.

“Let’s head home,” Yusuf says to Nile, her eyes heavy with exhaustion as she nods at him.

They get into an Uber, and that’s when Yusuf realizes how easily he’d called their destination home.

But it’s not the townhouse on Church Street; it’s not the university, or his cramped office or his lovely studio. It’s not the city. 

It’s Nicolo.

And when Yusuf drags himself to Nicolo’s door and raises his hand to knock, he sees a crust of blood drying on his knuckle, something he’d missed when he’d washed so thoroughly -- how had he missed it? 

Yusuf digs at it with his thumbnail before realizing it was a trick of the light. 

Taking a deep breath, he knocks, three sharp strikes of his knuckle against the wood.

Nicolo answers the door less than three seconds later, as though he’d been waiting by for the knock; the smile on his face is strong enough to knock Yusuf off his feet. Rather than fall, he steps into Nicolo’s open arms and kisses his cheek before tucking his nose into the sweet space where Nicolo’s neck meets his shoulder. 

Nicolo gets the door shut and drags him to the messily made bed; they fall to the mattress still wrapped in each other, and Nicolo accepts each kiss Yusuf presses to his mouth, humming with happiness for every kiss. Yusuf realizes he’s crying when Nicolo pulls away with a soft, concerned noise -- but Nicolo kisses each tear and then his jaw before wrapping his arms around him and holding him tenderly.

“I missed you,” Nicolo says before Yusuf can summon the ability to speak.

“You have my heart,” Yusuf answers, unable to mask the grief in his voice. Nicolo pulls back at that, his grey-green eyes filled with worry but also a fragile hope that threatens to rip Yusuf in half.

Whatever Nicolo sees in Yusuf’s face earns him another kiss, and they fall asleep like that, legs tangled, foreheads touching, finally at peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhh boys. at least they got to cuddle?
> 
> In the next chapter (Five), we find out some important info, like how Nicky's parents died. We might see some sexy/mature moments in chapter 6, earning us that rating at last.
> 
> Like I said in the chapter note at the top, this fic might be 8 chapters, but will most likely be 10 (because I always seem to get to the end of an idea for a chapter and the other thing i wanted to include gets scooted to the next chapter so the chapters aren't 10000 words long). I really hope you're interested enough to stick around for the long haul!!! 
> 
> Your support and encouragement has meant everything as I've been writing this (legitimately I wrote an actual outline for this today instead of just pulling from a google doc titled 'idea dump for modern nicky' that I add to in the shower and at 3 am when I wake up from fever dreams). thank you thank you thank you for giving this fic a chance!
> 
> I'd love to hear your thoughts, and any predictions you might have !?!? Any idea what was happening with Nicky at the start of the chapter? And how about Copley's sudden appearance? !?!? will I ever just let these boys kiss, and let them both be un-killable!?!?
> 
> [update, 8/29: i know I've been posting every other night, but the storm front came through and brought a big ol'migraine with it, so ... not tonight!! sorry!!!]


	5. Struggle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe learns about how Nicky fared when he was away; Nile struggles with the consequences of living forever; Nicky struggles with his past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO
> 
> I am sorry for the giant pause, I was in Migraine City and then work decided to be its Workiest Self so I was working twelve+ hours a day and ANYWAY hi hi hi thank you so much for continuing to read this (and this chapter is a Doozy so .. I am already sorry)
> 
>  _note_  
>  In this chapter, we see a minor/background character (OC) who struggles with homelessness and who experiences violence on the street as a queer teenager. All the violence is referenced/ in the past tense. I considered actually writing the scene, but decided the character's happy ending was much, much more important to write, and also, it would have been very traumatizing to write/read, but there are a lot of associated warnings regardless!  
> Also as a note, Yusuf considers Nicolo's relationship to the Catholic version of the Seven Deadly Sins, mainly from an introspection of Nicolo's relationship to sin/guilt/Catholicism!!! I know the worst/mortal/deadliest sins are different across religions, but he's trying to think like Nicky (more of an A/N than anything else, but I'm happy to change it if people think it necessary!)
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  References to **homophobic parents**  
>  Homophobic parents kick their child out of their home for being gay  
> Homeless Teenager  
> Implied violence  
> Implied attempted violence/assault on a teenager (nothing happens, and it is NOT graphic)  
> **  
> Nile in her POV struggles with immortality/grief  
> Nile thinks about the death of her entire family (non-graphic, still grief-based and sad)  
> **  
> Nicky and Joe get a little frisky (ahem) with consent verbalized and nothing too graphic happening (yet but we're getting there)  
> Then, Nicky has a massive panic attack (Unrelated to nice sexy times) and has sensory overload/PTSD flashbacks/dissociation episode  
> References to death of parents  
> Mildly detailed description of drowning

No matter what dreams plague him at night, in the daylight, Yusuf realizes that it’s Nicolo who has blood on his hands.

Literally.

Yusuf wakes before Nicolo, which is rare, but he’s coming off of a time difference and he always feels itchy after flying (the technology is too new, he explained to Nile once, he’s seen so much change, and he’s still getting used to  _ that  _ change). 

They’ve fallen into the pattern the handful of times they’ve shared a bed where they’ll spend time settling in and facing each other before they drift off to sleep: then, at some point in the night, Nicolo’s back finds itself against Yusuf’s chest, and Yusuf’s arms wrap around him. Nicolo makes soft, gentle noises as he sleeps, and if Yusuf is stirred awake (a rarity, as he’s the heaviest sleeper among the family), the hums from Nicolo’s throat have been enough to soothe him back into sleep.

So, when Yusuf wakes up first that day towards the end of the year, he sits up without disturbing Nicolo and looks down at him in the early grey light; it’s then that he sees the marks on his hands. The cuts and bruises. There are scabs along his knuckles, blood dried in the corners of his nailbeds like he’s spent the last few days brawling. 

Eventually, Nicolo wakes as well, the minute movements Yusuf makes enough to wake him out of his typically light sleep. He sees Yusuf watching him and offers him a small smile before wiping at his eyes and turning over. The gesture makes him wince a little, and Yusuf can see how a scab stretches and cracks a little over the knuckle of his index finger.

What he notices when Nicolo looks up at him, sunlight creating that strange clear effect in his eyes, is the bruise, already healing but still  _ there,  _ on his jaw.

“What happened?” Yusuf asks, his voice hoarse beyond the expectation of the first words of the day. His own fingers tremble as he traces the bruise along Nicolo’s jaw.

Violence does not belong on Nicolo’s body. The evidence of it is unsettling.

Nicolo shrugs though and offers him another genuine smile. “Nothing. Tell me about your trip?”

“Boring,” Yusuf answers quickly. The arched eyebrow he gets in response makes him huff in what could be amusement, if one squinted at it. 

In fairness, he’s the one who wept in his lover’s arms last night with no explanation, and he’s still avoiding the conversation -- he has no right to needle Nicolo until he tells him what made his hands look like that. And he’s certainly not willing to tell Nicolo he spent the last few days hunting down traffickers and killing a dozen men to save young girls from further sexual terror.

No matter what happened to make Nicolo’s hands look like that (punching a wall, he thinks, or tripping and scraping them, or  _ anything  _ he isn’t even  _ sure  _ because he hasn’t had a reason to study the pattern of injuries in so fucking long, and he has no benchmark for how severe the incident would have been to cause such ugly wounds on Nicolo’s beautiful hands), no matter what happened to bruise his jaw, no matter what Nicolo is keeping from him or is too embarrassed to talk of: Yusuf isn’t about to start sharing either (because Nicolo does not belong there, in the world of violence and avenging and terrified children who Yusuf hopes he’s actually saved).

So, he doesn’t push.

They make breakfast together using the three eggs Nicolo has left in his fridge and spend the morning lazily kissing in bed while Nicolo half-heartedly peruses a tome of poetry from the fifteenth century.

As far as mornings go, it feels perfect, almost too good to be true. Normal. As far as mornings go, reading poetry over Nicolo di Genova’s shoulder while he rests his head on Yusuf’s chest, his elbow propped on Yusuf’s knee as he lies between his legs, Yusuf doesn’t think he’s had a better one.

And he’s had over three hundred thousand of them, so that has to be saying something.

Patience, in the end, proves to be of some use: He gets his answer a week later.

They’re walking down Connecticut, Nicolo’s hand mottled with green at the knuckles, the scabs peeling and leaving soft pink flesh in their wake, the bruise a faded, distant imprint that Yusuf can only see when he tilts Nicolo’s jaw back to examine it (always leaving kisses in his wake). Nicolo’s hand is in his, as it should be always. It feels  _ right  _ in that jarring, settling way Yusuf hasn’t felt since they pulled Nile out of Panama in 1989. 

(He is imagining things, he tells himself every day in the mirror, he is imagining things that he wants to be real, that’s all)

They’re walking down Connecticut when a young, unfamiliar voice calls out to them, Nicolo in particular.

“Nicky!” The voice warbles slightly as it grows louder, and Nicolo is already turning around, a real smile on his face. “Nicky!!”

“Sammy.” Nicolo greets the small girl with a smile, and Yusuf looks between them with interest. 

There isn’t much reason for Nicolo to know this girl, after all: she’s clearly a child, maybe 16 or 17 at the oldest, and she has a backpack slung over a shoulder, beat-up sneakers on her feet, and that exhausted but determined look that Yusuf knows from spending years of his own (long) life on the run. 

A runaway, or perhaps homeless. Regardless of her current status, Sammy beams up at Nicolo.

(It’s then that Yusuf sees the bruise mottled under the girl’s eye, a sickly mark on her skin, covered poorly with makeup of some sort; it’s then that he notices how thin she is, how far the circles under eyes go even beyond that horrific mark; it’s then that he sees how small Nicolo makes himself, as though trying to diminish his large frame from making an incidental threat of violence).

His observations happen quickly, in the time it takes for the girl to uncurl her hands, re-curl them, and then surge forward, bouncing on her toes as she wraps too-thin arms around Nicolo’s frame.

“Nicky!” She says with great enthusiasm. “I found her! I found my aunt!”

“That’s fantastic,” Nicolo says with equal enthusiasm. “How wonderful-”

“She wants me to live with her.” Sammy rocks back on her heels and wipes at her eyes. “She - she said m-my parents were -- were idiots--” her breath staggers and Nicolo makes a soft noise, not unlike the ones he makes in sleep, a large hand raising to offer comfort before dropping at his side. 

Sammy gives him a watery smile but pushes forward. “It’s all b-because of you.” She wipes her nose inelegantly with the long sleeve of her baggy sweatshirt. “I wanted to come find you to let you know that - that she’s coming to get me.”

“That’s the best news I have heard in a long time,” Nicolo answers with an earnestness that is fairly blinding. “Where will you go?”

“Maine.” Sammy makes a little face and then shrugs. “She, uh, she said she’s been … looking for me since she heard my parents … you know.”

Nicolo nods but does not fill in the blank, only lets Sammy take a deep breath.

“And - and sorry, I - interrupted--” she looks between them then, and Nicolo glances at Yusuf and then smiles widely.

“This is my boyfriend,” Nicolo says with great pride, touching Yusuf’s elbow. “Joe.”

“Ooo.” Sammy’s face lights up with a smile that makes her look painfully young, and she gives Nicolo a thumbs up that she doesn’t even bother to hide. 

“Joe Jones,” Yusuf says, offering Sammy his hand but not reaching too far into her personal space. She takes it eagerly and shakes firmly.

“The doctor?” She stage-whispers to Nicolo, who nods with a bashful smile.

(This is the first time Yusuf has heard himself referred to as Nicolo’s  _ anything  _ \-- boyfriend is too small a word, he thinks, boyfriend cannot encompass what he feels for this man in such an incomprehensibly short amount of time, months mean nothing to him, they are hours to him at this point in his life, and yet Nicolo has sunk into how he sees the world, Nicolo’s laughter has shone lights in the darker corners that he has hidden away from, Nicolo’s smile has found scars he’d forgotten he’d made and suffered through -- no, he is  _ not  _ his boyfriend, but to hear Nicolo confirm that they are  _ each other’s,  _ well, that enough is a feeling more heady than any he’s felt in a long time)

“How do you two know each other?” Yusuf asks, curiosity winning out over his internal foray into writing poetry on Nicolo’s eyes (which is becoming alarmingly frequent to begin with).

“We met last week,” Nicolo says at the same time Sammy answers, “He saved my life.”

Nicolo shakes his head with another bashful smile, his eyes wounded somehow, as Sammy starts to protest at him. “No! You did!” She sighs in Yusuf’s direction. “He did. My aunt wants to meet you,” she says with another buoyant smile in Nicolo’s direction.

“I was only in the right place,” Nicolo argues gently. “And I would be honored to meet your aunt, Sammy.”

“In the right place.” Sammy snorts. “A lot of people heard and no one else helped -- this guy,” she’s focused on Yusuf again, whose eyes can’t help but slip to Nicolo at times in her explanation, “this guy heard some assholes jump me, trying to grab me while I was on the street, and he beat the  _ shit  _ out of all of them. I’ve never seen  _ anything  _ like it.”

Yusuf’s staring at Nicolo now, who’s blushing hard enough to reach his ears as he stares at the ground. 

“Then, he took me to dinner and got me into a hotel for a few nights before I could get into a shelter for kids --” Sammy clears her throat and gives Yusuf a nervous look before barrelling into, “kids like me.”

“It was not a big deal,” Nicolo tries to say, “Anyone would have--”

“No one else did,” Sammy cuts him off before shaking her head and laughing towards Yusuf, as if getting him to agree that  _ wow, this man, he is ridiculous, right?  _

Yusuf stops staring at Nicolo to give Sammy a reassuring smile because  _ yes, wow, this man.  _

(Not a big deal, Nicolo says, not a big deal like he doesn’t eat canned meat and instant rice and bottles of Gatorade while huddling under four blankets because he can’t quite rationalize heat for the month, not a big deal like he hadn’t risked his life to fight off violent men despite limited to no training in combat, not a big deal, he says)

“We were headed to lunch,” Yusuf offers, wanting to get off the street and also to hear  _ more about this story where Nicolo risked his safety and never told him about it,  _ “if you’d like to join us?”

Sammy protests at first but when she sees they’re only going to a ramen place up the road, nods with a big smile. 

The rest of the story comes out in pieces, intermixed with Sammy’s story about how she got kicked out (“it’s love your neighbor and your kid until they come out to you, you know?” with an affected Southern accent, and they all laugh a little bit but there’s pain, so much pain in Sammy’s eyes, in Nicolo’s eyes, in Yusuf’s heart because this story shouldn’t be so common, this pain shouldn’t be so constant). 

Nicolo got her into contact with a nun (“the bishop doesn’t like her a lot,” he mutters into his soup) who runs a shelter for LGBTQ kids, and Sammy was able to call her aunt from Nicolo’s phone, and then again from the shelter. She’ll be taking the train with her aunt back up towards Boston and then they’ll drive to Maine, and Nicolo’s happiness for her is so palpable that it fills the booth with what feels like sunshine, the two of them laughing and smiling together as though they’ve known each other much more than a week.

But Nicolo is like that, Yusuf realizes. Nicolo can make it feel like you’ve always known him, simply because you meet him and wish you always had.

After they're done eating, they see Sammy off to the bus, Nicolo’s phone number on a scrap of paper in her pocket, and they head back towards campus, their destination Yusuf’s house so Nicolo can use the office to print some of his readings.

On their way there, Yusuf clears his throat and squeezes Nicolo’s hand. “You never told me?” 

Nicolo is quiet for a moment, but he squeezes back. 

“She isn’t a story,” is the simple reply.

“Sammy’s right though, most people wouldn’t have--”

“It was Christmas Eve.” Nicolo’s voice is strangely flat. “Christmas Eve and those men were going to -- a child.” His face changes, and for a moment, Yusuf thinks he’ll cry, until he realizes the expression is fury.

“A child on Christmas Eve?” Nicolo shakes his head. “What kind of man would I be if I did not help her?”

There are a thousand things Yusuf wants to say and ask (and he  _ does  _ want to scold, but what hypocrisy that would be, considering he’d been shot fifteen times that same night), but before he can, Nicolo adds in a voice that’s colder than the wind that cuts sharp and clear around the street corner:

“I broke the jaw on one of them.”

Perhaps he thinks Yusuf will judge him for it; perhaps this is Nicolo showing what he thinks is his worst part to him -- Yusuf has not seen Nicolo grow sick with envy, nor has he seen him grow greedy in lust, nor swell with pride, nor act in gluttony. He had been imagining Nicolo to be a man of moderation, through and through, but perhaps this has shown him the truth of Nicolo:

Perhaps it is wrath that Nicolo’s soul has grown familiar with. Perhaps wrath is the shadow that chases the light from his eyes sometimes.

(Wrath is not always evil, Yusuf has learned. Wrath is often necessary)

Yusuf wastes no time in squeezing Nicolo’s hand, or bringing his hands to his lips to press a kiss to his knuckles.

“Good,” he says simply.

The tension bleeds out of Nicolo’s shoulders.

They don’t talk about it after that, and when they are inside once more, they curl up in Yusuf’s study, Nicolo reading again with his head in Yusuf’s lap, and Yusuf drawing, charcoal embedding itself under his nails as he sketches without focus (images of Nicolo, he’ll realize later, Nicolo with a burning sword held aloft as he cuts down wicked men, his hair long and eyes so cold it is its own kind of wildness)

They don’t talk about it after that, but Yusuf kisses every healing cut on Nicolo’s knuckles that night as Nicolo drifts towards sleep at the tender touch; he kisses every one and thinks

_ They could have killed you. Four on one, she said -- they could have -- _

_ Four on one. How did they  _ not  _ kill you? _

_ Those men do not deserve to walk the same earth as you and Sammy -- _

_ They could have killed you. _

_ Don’t you know how fragile you are? They could have killed you, Nicolo, they could have  _ killed  _ you, and I would have come home to  _ \--

Somewhere in his thoughts, Nicolo is stirred to wakefulness again, and he sits up, concern in his clear, beautiful eyes. When Yusuf still can’t think of something to say, it’s Nicolo who holds him.

Nicolo holds him and kisses wounds that never had a chance to scab or scar.

* * *

Nile Freeman has not been to church regularly since she deployed.

She’d been so proud. The first, the best, the brightest. Her family had been so proud.

Sometimes, she thinks of the flag that her mother had been given, the flag handed over at a ceremony where an empty box was lowered into the ground, the salute, the tears, her family grouped ‘round as she watched from a mile away, Andy’s hand an anchor on her shoulder.

(When she was a kid, she used to imagine being invisible and going to her own funeral; now that she knows what it feels like, she wants to go back and tell herself to find a better way to use her imagination)

It’s not that she’s angry with God for doing whatever this is. It’s not that she’s stopped believing, or that she doesn’t want to go. It just all feels so separate, so foreign to her now. Like there’s a ghost inside her and outside her and in that church and up on that altar and she … she doesn’t know what to do with any of them.

But, Nile needs them today. All of the ghosts that suffocate her on a normal day, that she pushes away with another degree, another country to travel to, another life saved. She runs from the ghosts most days, but today.

Nile bows her head and thinks about the ghosts she can’t escape.

When she leaves the church, there are tears on her face, and she steps out into the bright sun, too bright against the sharp cold of the late January afternoon. With a sniff, she tucks her hands into the pockets of her green jacket and glances down the street.

There’s a flash across the block, sunlight catching on shiny frames: a familiar face beyond that.

She watches the traffic pattern and then steps out into the street, weaving between pedestrians and cyclists on the other side to reach her destination.

“Booker.” Nile nods at him, and he gives her a rare smile.

“Coffee?”

They end up at a small cafe near campus, a little hole-in-the-wall she’d discovered last year when she started her third PhD, and Booker orders for both of them, somehow getting her own latte perfectly ordered (Grande, iced, vanilla), but scalding himself with espresso before he can even sit down.

He gets another drink and settles in the back corner with her, a scarf wound around his neck as he scans the cafe idly, not on the alert but alert all the same. 

(They all have soldiers’ eyes; Nile finds herself appreciating the casual existence of her classmates more and more, the older she gets.)

Booker does not bother with idle chit-chat; doesn’t ask if she’s seen this match or another, doesn’t ask how she’s feeling after their mission last month. He studies her, his blue eyes unusually clear, his face softer than normal.

“It’s today, isn’t it?” He murmurs, jarring her from the study of his now-familiar features.

“What is?” She plays obtuse, if only to give herself a few seconds to prepare, her thumbnail picking at the cardboard sleeve.

“His birthday.” Booker leans forward and touches the table near her wrist, but not her wrist itself. “Michael’s birthday.”

Nile feels her face crumble, and she nods, looking down at her drink so he won’t see her cry because if he sees her cry, he’ll do that weird annoying Booker thing where he gets worked up and seeks increasingly dangerous ways to distract her from being sad, like that one time she was upset in the nineties, when he jumped off the London Bridge and tried to land on a ferryboat.

“I - I know this is how this works,” she mutters, her shoulders tense. Nile realizes how defensive she looks and sounds, but only shakes her head more. “I know -- it’s -- I mean, I lost my mom and my aunts and my uncles, but …” Nile wipes at her nose again. “He was my baby brother.” Her voice cracks, and Booker’s hand covers hers. “I was supposed to protect him -- and … and of course he died, they  _ all  _ died, they all die, so why am I --”

She can’t keep going, so she just slumps forward and takes a ragged breath, and Booker’s thumb strokes gently over her knuckles before he squeezes her hand.

“This isn’t going to get any easier,” he tells her, matter-of-fact, the accents not softening the reality of it. “But … but you don’t have to do this alone. I … am here, and so is Andy. And Yusuf. We … we have felt it too.” He laughs a little, and she looks up to his mischievous, self-deprecating smile. “I know I make a clusterfuck of it sometimes, and you are already so much better at this than I am, but … you do not always have to be good at it.”

She’d taught him the word clusterfuck a few months after she died the first time; he and Andy had loved the word to the point that Yusuf had banned it for three years (it didn’t work).

Nile laughs wetly. “When did you get to be so smart?”

His smile shifts into a smirk as he leans back in his chair, hands wide. “I have always been smart, mon ami. I happen to be sober right now.”

“Oh yeah?” Nile grins at him, wiping her cheek a little. “What’s the occasion?”

“I wanted to be here in case you needed me.”

Nile looks at him, actually looks at him, and sees a little past the ragged facade he puts on for all of them, the wandering spirit, the alcoholic with an impenetrable liver, the man who’d thrown himself in front of a grenade so Andy wouldn’t have to deal with it, who’d joked with a little too little humor that  _ “fuck, I thought that one would do it.”  _

It feels like she’s actually seeing him.

“More coffee?” 

She nods, startled out of her thoughts for a moment, and she rattles the ice around her empty cup until Booker comes back with another iced latte which she takes with a murmur of thanks.

Booker watches Nile, worried that she’s tucked her sadness out of the way, the way she’s so used to. He worries that he’ll only dampen her mood further, but there’s a question that’s been tugging at his mind since he heard about the student who’d worked his way into Nile and Joe’s life, the young man who cannot follow them through the world, the young man who will not always be young, the young man who will not always be there.

“Do you think,” he asks, well aware that this could make her hate him, “that … your friendship with … Joe’s Nicky is making this year … harder for you?”

Nile stares over his shoulder for so long, he’s worried she’ll throw the table at him or tell him to fuck off, or a combination of the two. But, her voice is even and honest when she responds. 

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Is the pain … is it worth it?” He’s never been close to another human since he died; he couldn’t even bear to see his own children more than a few times a year when he’d come home, and then only once a decade after they were grown. 

(It’s only more evidence that Nile and Joe are stronger than he is)

Nile smiles at him then, full and broad and real. “Of course it is.”

Nile smiles at him, and Booker sees the sun.

* * *

As far as Valentine’s Days go, Nicky thinks this is his best one. 

Sure, it’s a few days after Valentine’s, and sure, they missed their reservation, but it’s more than worth it as he and Joe lose track of time on Joe’s couch.

“Yusuf,” he whispers, breath catching in his throat as Joe trails hot fingers down his chest, the buttons undone on his shirt and lying open. 

Cool air balances well with the heated kisses Joe starts to press into his sternum, his collarbone, his fingers still moving dexterously and torturously across his ribs and to his hips.

For a moment, Nicky wishes he’d had the foresight to suggest they make out on Joe’s bed and not on the (admittedly large and nice) couch in his living room, but he doesn’t want to suggest it now because his nerve endings are on fire and there’s a roiling low in his gut that he’s never felt before, a hunger seizing him that he barely has a name for.

“Yusuf,” he repeats, dizzy and drunk on it when Yusuf comes back up to kiss him; he slots a knee between Joe’s thighs and manages to twist them both until they’re on their sides and still kissing, their hands roaming with more freedom than they’d allowed in the past.

Joe’s chest is smooth under his fingers, his muscles firm ( _ where does he find time to work out?  _ Nicky thinks dazedly before he gets distracted by  _ Joe  _ all of this  _ Joe,  _ and goes back to adoration), and Nicky makes some noises he isn’t proud of when Joe’s hips roll into his, the angle a little awkward because of their position. It still manages to draw a wrecked moan from his mouth.

“Too far?” Joe asks, kissing him sweetly.

Nicky shakes his head, plunging back into the kiss with probably way too much enthusiasm, his fingers tangling in Joe’s curls, his wonderful, soft, beautiful curls that Nicky dreams about. He licks into Joe’s mouth, the way he’s learned to over the last few months, but now their shirts are mostly off, and his entire body feels like it’s going to shake apart and still, still there’s not enough of Joe touching him.

His fingers are trembling when he traces the line of Joe’s belt, thumb hooking along the waistband of his pants, and Joe senses his hesitation. “Yes,” he murmurs to the unspoken question, his hips rolling again. “Nico, toccami-”

There’s some white noise involved in his thoughts then because the sliver of skin beneath Joe’s waistband is smooth and hot and  _ smooth  _ and so, so precious, and he shifts his hips a little, trying to signal to Joe to copy him.

Joe’s fingers are much more deft when they undo the button of his jeans, and Nicky hums into the kiss happily when Joe touches the band of his boxers experimentally.

And then, of course, the phone rings.

Loud and blaring: Nicky scowls at the noise but continues to kiss Joe. He’s fairly certain a full truck could drive through the house and he wouldn’t notice; a grenade could go off and he wouldn’t care. He’s kissing Joe after all, his Joe, his darling Joe who he  _ loves  _ and he hasn’t even  _ told him yet  _ but if he keeps touching Nicky like this, Nicky is going to forget all the languages he knows and he won’t even remember how to  _ say  _ that he loves him, so he better figure out how to show Joe --

“I should get that,” Joe mutters when the phone rings again a few minutes later. 

Loud. Blaring.

Nicky scowls and tries not to pout when Joe pulls away to grab the phone. He gets many cuddles for his troubles, kisses pressed to his hair; he tilts his face up and kisses Joe’s neck, making his breath sharp and needy in response. He smiles victoriously into Joe’s skin as Joe tries to talk to the person on the other end.

Joe speaks in beautiful French, too quick for Nicky to try and translate (he wouldn’t really try because that would be  _ rude,  _ if Joe wanted to be overheard, he’d probably speak in English or Italian, unless his caller only speaks in French, and ugh, he’s thinking too much when he could be kissing Joe)

He returns to kissing Joe’s chest and stomach and everything he can above the waist before he rests his cheek on his own arm so he can smile up at Joe. When Joe hangs up ten minutes later, he’s smiling at Nicky with a tenderness that makes his chest ache.

“Hello.”

“Hi.” Nicky’s smile feels nervous, which is absurd because he was  _ so close  _ to finding out what made Joe lose control, what made him gasp and moan and throw his head back (he was so close to seeing what Joe looked like when he came, and the thought is enough to make Nicky blush).

“Hi,” Joe repeats, and they both laugh bashfully.

“Don’t you have class in the morning?” Joe asks, glancing at the clock.

It isn’t a dismissal, but Nicky can’t help the flare of disappointment. Joe’s absolutely right: it’s almost one in the morning, as they’d been kissing for a lot longer than he’d thought. He does need to go, and he should go home because his laptop is there and his lecture notes, and he has class in seven hours, and those freshmen really  _ really  _ require a significant amount of energy.

So, he nods, and sighs dramatically, and earns a kiss for his grumbling. That mollifies him enough to get to the door, and Nicky and Joe look at each other (no doubt looking beyond foolish to any onlookers) before Nicky heads out the door and into the cold, clear night.

He tilts his head back and grins up at the constellations, shaking his head; when he looks back before turning the corner, the soft, warm light spilling out from Joe’s foyer is still there, the man himself wreathed in golden light as he watches Nicky walk away. 

Nicky falls asleep still smiling, the echoes of Joe’s touch lingering on his skin.

* * *

Nothing bad happens in February.

Now, Nicky’s life is not precisely set up for him to avoid catastrophe with any regularity. He courts disaster. Concussions, fights with strangers, everything in his past and probably in his future: for someone who doesn’t have many friends, who doesn’t go out often, and who honestly does  _ not  _ have a career that is anything close to dangerous, Nicky finds himself in shitty situations far more than he should.

But February goes by without incident; February exists as a golden month, peaceful and sweet on the tongue. In February, he kisses Joe Jones and writes another forty pages in his dissertation that gets his advisor to nod in approval and manages to cut a minute off of his mile time and generally does not injure himself in a way that makes Joe look like he wants to cry.

February is great.

In March, he’s reminded that the universe doesn’t really like him.

It happens when he walks up the street to Joe’s house, hands crammed into the pockets of his blue jacket (and no, River, he hasn’t learned his lesson, and yes, he’s going to walk with his hands in his pockets because his hands are cold, and no, he has not considered buying gloves). 

He’s a little nervous about the condoms stashed in his backpack, but he’s really ready, actually ready, after a lot (a lot a lot a lot alotalotalot) of introspection and so many (so so so sosososo many) dreams about Joe; he loves Joe, and he’s going to tell him, and then he’s going to have sex with him, and somewhere in there he’s going to forget that he is an Awkward Turtle, which is something River calls him when he starts to blush and remember that things don’t usually go his way. 

_ Awkward Turtles can have sex too,  _ a voice that sounds bizarrely like River assures him in his mind.

(That’s not the best mental image, he thinks)

He turns the corner and sees Joe already in front of his house, deep in conversation with a tall woman with short dark hair. Joe sees him coming, and he looks very tense -- his eyes flicker to the woman before he waves at Nicky, a real if tired smile on his face.

The woman turns to see who Joe is waving to, and the world comes to a painful halt, where Nicky can see his heartbeat in his eyes.

_ No,  _ is his first thought.

_ Who,  _ is his second.

_ She knows me,  _ is his third when he sees her eyes widen in recognition. 

And then the memories fill him, branching out from his lungs and filling his throat and this street where only three people are standing becomes much, much too full and loud and busy.

Nicky turns on his heel and walks back quickly the way he came.

His fingers tap his neck anxiously, and he tries to breathe,  _ in for four, out for four, in for four, out for -- _

_ Fuck that was three -- _

_ Fuck, it’s just breathing -- _

_ Fuck -- _

Nicky’s breath clatters in his lungs, and it isn’t even close to enough. The world screams at him, the light too loud and the people too close and he - he needs --

His feet trip and stumble over the first step to his building, and Nicky clings to the railing, shaking violently. If he lets go, he’ll fall, if he lets go, he’ll sink, if he lets go, he’ll--

_ She was -- _

_ Right there, like no time had -- _

_ No, it was too fast, you didn’t get close enough -- _

_ Might not even be -- _

His thoughts are a storm he can’t escape, and the waves build over his head. He twists and falls to the step; it’s when a neighbor comes out and makes a series of concerned noises (probably talking) that he staggers to his feet and stammers  _ thanks  _ before running up the stairs, his shoulder banging into the wall as he goes for his door, just wanting to be inside, just wanting to be alone, just wanting to --

_ She was -- _

He sinks to the floor with the door locked behind him, and he buries his face in his knees. Nicky wants to scream, but his lungs are full, he wants to scream, but there’s not enough air, he needs to scream, but the world is shaking, he --

“Nicolo?”

The world might not be shaking; someone is pounding at the door, calling for him, and each knock shudders at the wood behind him.

“Nicolo, please, are you okay?” 

Joe.

Nicky breathes unsteadily, the world greying out around him as he presses his palms to his ears and tries to breathe, tries to think, tries to--

“Nico, baby, please, please open the door-”

Nicky manages to get a shaking hand on the deadbolt and scoots to the side enough to slide it open. Joe hears the lock being moved because the door opens a second later, and Joe hovers in the doorway.

Then, there’s cursing in a series of languages he can’t pin down, not right now, and Joe sinks to the floor next to him, the door clicking shut softly beyond either of their notice.

“Nicolo?” he reaches out, and Nicky shivers, shakes his head, hides in his knees again. “Here, let me get you some water--”

“No!” Nicky snaps, looking up wildly. “No, no, --”

“Okay.” Joe doesn’t flinch from the outburst, but Nicky feels staggeringly guilty anyway for yelling. “Alright. I’m … I’ll sit here. Okay?”

Nicky nods, or at least he thinks he does; he feels like he’s drifting in his head, time playing games with him again where it stops and starts like flotsam on the water, jammed up around the weeds. 

Joe doesn’t push him to talk, but time must pass because the light changes in the apartment until Joe gestures to the bed. 

“Do you want to sit more comfortably?”

Nicky shakes his head, stops, and then shrugs. He stands, sliding his hands on the wall, breath still ragged but more even, and then walks to the bed on shaking legs. 

Joe follows, and sits at a distance where he isn’t too close, but is clearly within reach. Nicky appreciates it. Appreciates him. Loves him. 

_ But why -- _

“How do you know her.”

It’s meant as a question, but it comes out far too flat. His eyes fixate on a point on the crappy laminate floor where it’s bubbling up along an edge.

“Who?” 

Nicky blinks but doesn’t elaborate.

“Oh… we’ve worked together in the past?” Joe pauses and then asks, “How do you know her?”

_ Why did you act like that when you saw her  _ is unspoken, but Nicky hears it all the same.

“What is her name?” 

There’s no answer at first.

“What is her  _ name,  _ Joe?” His voice is sharper now, and he drags his eyes away from the floor to stare at Joe.

“Andy,” Joe answers. “Her name is Andy.”

And then, again, “How do you know her, Nicolo?”

“She…” Nicky starts and then stops. Remembers all the things he hasn’t told Joe. Nicky pinches the bridge of his nose and then keeps going. “She … she …”

“Nicolo?”

“My parents drowned.” Nicky says the words flatly, looking at Joe, refusing to look away, not sure why he’d push when he never pushes over anything. “-- I was -- I was in the--” 

He gags a little then and puts his head between his knees. Joe is there, murmuring soft things in Arabic that he doesn’t understand but appreciates for the kindness of the murmur, the warm hand between his shoulder blades. Even if he’s only crying because Joe wanted to know this, and now he has to say it and make it more real.

“I was in the water,” Nicky chokes out. “I was --” there’s no way this is coherent, but he isn’t  _ sure  _ how to tell the story. Only a few therapists have heard this much, his old priest. That’s it. “And sh-she saved my life.”

Joe’s hand pauses in its circles on his back. Nicky breathes in, still shaky, and sits up, his eyes on the floor again. His voice is flat once more as he tries to arrange it into an actual story, and while he knows it’d be easier to say it in Italian, he finds that the distance in English helps him get through it: 

“My parents took me to the water to see some friends, and we … all went out on a boat in the bay. S-Something went wrong. The boat sank; my parents … drowned, and so did some other important people. I … tried to help.” His throat closes painfully at the memory. “B-but it was so cold and they were so  _ far _ , and …”

His breath hiccups and staggers, limps away from him.

“Nico?”

“I started to drown.”  _ Cold. Dark. Pain, so much pain, chest collapsing, what was up or down, and - and where were his parents.  _ “I was drowning, and … and she saved me.”

He looks over at Joe and finds that his face is unreadable.

“She pulled me out of the water.” Nicky covers his mouth with his hand and laughs bitterly. It sounds like a sob.

“I thought she was an angel.”

He cries in earnest then, heartsick, his chest aching like it had that day in the water; he sinks into Joe’s open arms and cries into his shirt, soaking it through, and he can’t escape it, the water, it’s still inside him, some sick perversion of baptism where he came back out and everyone he loved didn’t.

Nicky cries, full and deep and with awful, ugly tears, as Joe holds him, and he cries because it doesn’t make any sense, and of course his angel isn’t an angel, of course she’s a normal person, with a name and friends and a story, and the only reason he was pulled from the water was because she was in the right place (and if he had any logic left, he’d see the irony in that, the beauty in that, but he’s stuck too deep in his mind to see it).

Nicky cries because he’d been saved and no one else had been saved and his angel is  _ real and breathing and here,  _ and nothing is okay and dry ground is too far away and sometimes, sometimes he’s certain she never dragged him out of the water and he’s still down there, floating towards the bottom of the ocean, trapped in uncaring currents and lost to time forever.

Nicky cries, and Joe holds him; eventually he collapses into a sleep that is more of an unconsciousness than rest, but he welcomes it all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ......  
> ..............
> 
> So yeah this fic might be longer than 8 chapters, anyway, uh
> 
> Uh, so, uh, Andy *has* met Nicky before, and, uh, I think that might, uh, interfere with some theories (and I'm so sorry)
> 
> I'd love to hear more theories and thoughts and anything you'd like to shout at me about even if it's just a keysmash. Your comments have been keeping me going and I always go back and read them with a lil :) :) on my face, so, thank you thank you


	6. Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusuf and Nicolo reconnect after a difficult moment; and then, grow closer than ever
> 
> **check warnings for this chapter ... and all the following chapters tbh, just to be safe**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (winky face from the summary)
> 
> HELLO in penance for missing a chapter update yesterday (Pulled a muscle in my neck and life is Agony!), this chapter is extra long (8000 words I think) and full of smut and ... well, you'll see!  
> (Note: time skips a little in this chapter!! It basically covers the tail end of March to mid-or-late May! aka the next chapter is summer and if it feels like I"m speeding up time, why yes, yes I am mwahah b/c isn't that how nice, happy relationships feel ;) ;) )
> 
> Anywayyyyy:
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Smut! At last! ( **note** the smut is actually packaged in between two line breaks, so if you go from "they end up in Yusuf's bed" to the next line break, you don't need to read the smut if you aren't currently in the mood!)  
> Consensual, manual stimulation (unprotected penis contact! but if it's any consolation, Nicky is definitely clean, and Joe ... I think canonically cannot get STIs, so ... please pretend they've spoken in the past about wearing condoms//using protection for nonpenetrative sex!!)  
> Enthusiastic consent from both parties! But --  
>  **potential warning** : Nicky still does not KNOW that Joe is IMMORTAL when they do these things, but as we see very soon, they are both still not telling the full part of their back story to each other)
> 
> Another potential warning: Nicky briefly references some internalized homophobia he experienced as a young teenager due to his Catholic faith (he no longer feels that way and states that explicitly)

“...and that was two weeks ago.”

Nicky folds his napkin into tiny creases, a nervous habit, and fiddles with the balled-up paper before looking across the table.

River watches him steadily. There’s no pity in her face, thank God. Instead, her eyes are heavy with understanding and compassion. Not for the first time, he wonders who she’s lost: he doesn’t ask, though. They’ve been friends for almost two years, and he’s only opening up to her now. He can’t push her to do the same.

“Thank you for telling me all that,” River says softly, as though reading his mind. “I -- I knew  _ something  _ must have happened. But, I never could have guessed…” she trails off, not for loss of words, but because the words are too large to be said here in a crowded coffeeshop with their laptops propped open between them to create the pretense of getting work done on their dissertations.

“You haven’t spoken to Joe since?” River hedges a moment later, slightly worried in her tone.

“No.” Nicky shakes his head and lets out an even shakier breath. “No, I … I asked him for some time. He sends me texts to say good morning and good night, and he ordered some dinners to be brought to my door the days after--” he smiles fondly, his heart cracking at the memory of the quiet care demonstrated by the action, “--but, I haven’t exactly responded … I needed space. Am I crazy? For wanting--”

“No.” River answers immediately. Firm. “No, you are  _ not  _ crazy, Nicky. You’ve been through Hell and back, you can handle that on your own terms and your own time. Joe understands that. He loves you.”

She sounds perfectly sure of that last fact, and Nicky frowns at her.

“I don’t know about that,” he mumbles, picking up his now-cold cappuccino and swirling the contents.  _ Blech.  _

In reality, Nicky wants to text Joe back. He wants to send him a thousand texts, he wants to walk to his door like he had two weeks ago, determined to confess his love and make love and do all of the embarrassing, mortifying things he’d hyped himself up to do before he came across the angel from his worst day --  _ Andy,  _ he has to think, her name is  _ Andy,  _ and she’s a person, a person who knows Joe and knows him well. 

He wants to hold Joe in his arms again. He wants to be held. He wants.

But, every time he picks up the phone his throat closes: it’s been too long, he rationalizes. Two whole weeks of radio silence; soon, Joe will stop making any attempt to contact him, and then it will all fade away, including Joe’s interest in him. Their relationship will reveal itself to be a fling. Joe will realize that Nicky is beyond scarred (and he doesn’t even know the  _ worst  _ thing Nicky’s  _ done _ , he only knows a piece of it all). 

Joe will wake up and remember that  _ he’s  _ Yusuf Jones, sexy, erudite professor with art galleries full of his work, and Nicky is … Nicky. With no family, no home, no money, no … anything. And it’s been two weeks since he’s done the most basic thing of texting him back, it’s been two weeks since he cried so hard in front of him he vomited, it’s been two weeks since Nicky begged him to leave while he tried to process that the woman who saved him from the water was, in fact, real, and she was  _ friends  _ with the man he loves now.

A warm hand covers his own, and Nicky pauses in where he’s shredding the napkin into tiny, angry pieces. River’s eyes are impossibly warm when he looks up, and she squeezes his hand firmly.

“The professor loves you,” River repeats, not letting him look away. “And I know he probably hasn’t  _ said  _ that yet, but … but come on, Nicky. Has anyone ever met you and not loved you?”

Nicky lifts his eyebrows and tilts his head to the side, making an incredulous face because  _ yes, actually, he can name quite a few bishops and priests who don’t exactly love him,  _ but River only shakes her head.

“I love you,” she offers, and her voice wobbles a little in the middle. “I know I give you shit sometimes, but--”

“I love you too,” Nicky assures her, flipping his hand so their fingers can lace together. “You’re my best friend, River.”

There’s some pain in her expression, but she looks down at her coffee and they don’t speak for a few moments.

Then, as the late March wind gusts past, dragging debris along the street outside, dark grey clouds clashing against the vibrant blue struggling to show through, River speaks up.

“My brother died a few years ago.” She sounds tentative. Nervous. “I … I tried to go to his funeral, but I got as far as the gates to the cemetery and couldn’t go any further.”

Nicky squeezes her hand this time, and rubs his thumb along the outside of her palm. He doesn’t offer empty words out of reflex: River doesn’t need an echo or a spasm of sympathy. There are wounds too big to heal sometimes, and all you can do with the scars is acknowledge them. He knows this.

They sit together in the cafe, their feet tangled together, hands clasped in a semblance of holiness, work abandoned. Nicky still feels rubbed raw and exhausted, but he isn’t alone. He holds River’s hand and imagines all the ways broken pieces can fit together, and he hopes in a quiet, private part of his heart, that he might not have to be alone again.

* * *

[Two Weeks Prior]

“Let me tell him,” Yusuf begged, grasping at Andy’s wrists after returning from Nicolo’s bed and anguished tears. “Please, please Andromache--”

“Tell him?” Andy scoffed a laugh, but in her eyes was pain. “So he can think you’re insane? This isn’t Scythia, Joe. He won’t think you’re a god.”

“I don’t want him to worship me,” Yusuf snapped, releasing her wrists and dragging his hands through his hair. “I want -- I only want --”

“You want a normal life.” Andy kicked a kitchen chair out and sank into it heavily. “You’re in love with the idea of normal, Joe, I’m just surprised it took you a thousand years to want to play house--”

She was too old to be outwardly startled when Yusuf slammed his hands on the table; inwardly, she must have been. Yusuf could be passionate, of course, but he was never  _ angry _ . Not like this.

“Don’t dismiss him like that,” Yusuf said brokenly, and she looked at him fully for the first time since he returned. “Nicolo isn’t -- he isn’t some rest stop in my life, Andy. He isn’t some reprieve. He’s the moon in darkness. He’s … warmth when I’m shivering in the cold. Andy,” he begged through her name again, and she didn’t look away, but he could see how much she pitied him.

“Andy, I love him.” He took a ragged breath. “Beyond measure. Or reason. I understand that - that this won’t end well. Do you know how many times I have prayed to wake up mortal?” 

Andromache flinched at that and looked away.

“Each time I knick my finger or stub a toe or cut myself shaving, I pray that it won’t heal. But it does. Every time. I would give anything to grow old with him.”

“You barely know him,” Andy countered, but she was subdued now, staring out the window at the blustery night. “You barely know him, Joe, it’s been five months. That’s nothing to us.”

“It’s everything to me,” Yusuf said. He sunk into a chair of his own and buried his face in his hands. “Everything.”

Andy stared at her beloved Yusuf for a long moment as his shoulders shook with barely repressed anguish; after a long moment, she reached out and grasped his wrist until he looked up and took her hand.

“Are we nothing to you?” She asked sadly. “Have you always felt … incomplete with us?”

“You are my family,” Joe answered immediately, his fingers flexing around hers. “I have loved you for so long I cannot remember a time when I did not love you. Do not doubt that.”

“But this boy?” A strong look from Yusuf had her re-wording. “This man -- he’s … after five months? You would give it all up? Our lives, our privacy. Even your life?”

“I like to think it wouldn’t be giving anything up,” Yusuf countered. “It would be a new life. A different one. With hope for a peaceful end.” 

Andy looked away again; he knew it was a button to press, he knew she also longed for release. The only thing that motivated her to keep going was the idea of Quynh.

“If you never age, and he does, will it be worth it? To tell him everything. To keep him at your side. Think of Booker, and his children. They  _ hated  _ him, Yusuf.”

“Nicolo wouldn’t.” He wasn’t sure where that confidence came from, but he was sure of it. “Nicolo would--”

“You would be content to have … what, sixty years, seventy if you’re lucky? You would be okay with him growing old, and withered, crumbling away before you?”

Yusuf didn’t answer; he didn’t want the thought to form in his mind. His only logical argument at the moment was a cruel one:  _ you’re never going to find Quynh _ , he could say,  _ and you’ve wasted half a millennium looking for her anyway. Why can’t I have half a century with someone I love? _

He didn’t say it though. No matter how distraught he was, Yusuf was not cruel.

“I just want more time,” he said, deflating at the pity in Andy’s expression. 

She tapped her fingers against her thigh and nodded, letting go of his hand before standing and grabbing her bag. “Then you’ll understand that I need some more time, too. Before we expose ourselves to him. Let me think about it, Joe. For now, just tell him -- tell him you and I are friends. That’s true. Tell him that I was in a boat nearby when his parents drowned, and I jumped in and saved the person who I could save, which was him. That’s also true; he doesn’t need to know I was looking for Quynh. As for the whole story, we need to discuss it as a group--”

“Nile already wants to--”

“A group that includes me and Booker,” Andy said, not unkindly. She walked around the table and gripped his shoulder without looking down. “For what it’s worth, I wish it could work.”

He touched her fingers and nodded. “Me too.”

When the door shut behind her, Yusuf buried his face in his hands and wept.

* * *

Nicky ends up at Joe’s door three days after his conversation with River: telling her had been a physical relief, in the way that his sobbing after seeing Andy the not-angel hadn’t been. He feels lighter, and it helps that River hadn’t offered any kind of advice to talk to Joe or not, beyond her reassurance that anyone in their right mind would want more time with Nicky.

He does not deserve her friendship, Nicky decides as he bounces on his feet on Joe’s doorstep, he does not deserve it, but he is eternally grateful that he has it anyway.

His knuckles are poised above the wood, fist ready to knock the second he decides; Nicky goes back and forth -- he’s walked this far, it’s early in the morning and this would be rude, Joe sends him texts earlier than this all the time, he misses him, what if Joe  _ doesn’t  _ miss him --

In the end, Nicky doesn’t have to decide. The door opens and reveals Joe, hair tousled and his bag slung over his shoulder. His eyes widen comically at the sight of Nicky (disheveled, wearing a sweatshirt that’s seen better days with the hood pulled up to warm his ears) bouncing on his doorstep. For a moment, they both freeze, staring at each other.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky blurts out because if there’s  _ one  _ thing he’s good at as a nervous Catholic, it’s apologizing. “I’m so sorry, Yusuf-”

It's the sound of his real name that has Joe moving forward, his strong arms wrapping around him before he kisses the side of Nicky’s face, shaking his head so his beard scratches along the crook of Nicky’s neck.

“Don’t apologize for returning,” Joe whispers, and Nicky wraps his arms around him in return, feeling something unwind in his stomach, the buzzing headache he’s had for three weeks fading into nothingness. “Don’t.”

“I’m sorry for staying away then,” Nicky counters, and Joe laughs and shakes his head again before he pulls away and tugs Nicky by the hands into his foyer, closing the door behind them.

“Were you going somewhere?” Nicky asks, confused and not wanting to intrude on Joe’s plans for the day. He gestures to the bag over Joe’s shoulder, and Joe snorts and tosses the bag away from them, into the corner like it’s offended his family.

“Right here seems good.” Joe holds his face in his hands and looks at him like he’s something precious. 

Nicky fights the immediate urge to duck his head and look away; he doesn’t want to look away from Joe. It’s been too long, even if this open, vulnerable expression on Joe’s face sort of makes him want to burrow under the sofa and not come out for a few hours.

Nicky thinks Joe’s going to kiss him, but instead when he leans in, he brings their foreheads together and just breathes, his thumbs stroking along Nicky’s jaw. Nicky brings his hands up to wrap fingers around Joe’s wrists, and they stand in the foyer like that for a few minutes before Nicky nudges his nose against Joe’s, pressing in until their mouths slot together and they exchange breath and kisses as though no distance had ever built up between them.

_ I love you,  _ Nicky thinks dizzily as Joe presses another fervent kiss to his mouth. 

Soon, he’ll be brave enough to tell him, but for now, he’s content with this drowsy peace that washes over them.

* * *

Nicolo is beautiful in the springtime, Yusuf decides quickly.

They walk through farmer’s markets, Nicolo talking excitedly of flowers and bread and pointing out every single dog they pass; Yusuf watches him the whole time, marveling at the way the strengthening sunlight catches in his large green eyes.

Their hands are laced together as they walk, something that doesn’t fail to thrill Yusuf. Nicolo’s thumb strokes over his knuckles now and then, a steady beat of reassurance that Nicolo is truly present in this moment with him. Yusuf likes being outside with Nicolo; he enjoys sneaking these moments of stolen happiness where he wears his baseball cap (Nicolo teases him about it for a full hour the first time he wears it, but then wraps his long arms around him and kisses him senseless, so Yusuf figures he doesn’t hate it entirely), and his large sunglasses, a light scarf wrapped around his neck as he follows Nicolo through the stalls.

It makes him remember the markets of his childhood, even though this is so much different, slightly artificial, not nearly as busy. He holds Nicolo’s hand here in the present as his mind slips backwards and he tries not to imagine Nicolo in each of these memories, tries not to imagine him bartering over bread in London in 1605, or talking with Quynh about the quality of silk in 1340, but the images emerge anyway.

Images of Nicolo at his side since the beginning, wiping away centuries of exhaustion, boredom, loneliness. Yusuf understands that Nicolo is not a panacea for these things -- he loves his family, and despite Andy’s concerns, Yusuf doesn’t feel like he’s been  _ incomplete  _ in the past -- but something about him has forced the universe to shift, almost like it had been spinning slightly off-kilter for some time, and now it has slotted back into its rightful place.

He looks up to see Nicolo debating a croissant at a stall from Bethesda, and he hands the money to the girl behind the register before Nicolo can think twice; Nicolo protests lightly but then huffs and tucks his hands around the flaky pastry, his nostrils flaring as he inhales dreamily.

“Good?” Yusuf chuckles, letting his hand drift to Nicolo’s lower back; he rubs his back lightly through the loose shirt he wears, and he feels and hears the answering hum that comes from deep inside his chest.

“So good, Joe.” Nicolo sniffs the pastry one more time before taking a large bite that leaves butter at the corner of his mouth. 

Yusuf laughs and tugs Nicolo to the side so they’re out of the main thoroughfare. He rests his back against a brick wall and keeps an eye on the busy street (simply sightseeing to Nicolo’s unsuspecting perspective), making sure there are no approaching threats. 

It’s a hard habit to kick, even here in the relative anonymity of his secret life as an art professor on a pleasant Saturday morning with his boyfriend.

(He needs a better word than boyfriend; sometimes, when he doesn’t mind hurting himself, Yusuf tests out the word husband and decides it is  _ better  _ even though it does not fully fit)

Nicolo’s tongue darts out to catch a crisp of pastry that’s collected at the corner of his mouth, the croissant fully demolished in his hunger; Yusuf laughs and uses his thumb to wipe away the little bit of butter that’s still there, and Nicolo leans in, smiling, for a kiss. It tastes like pastry and also of Nicolo, so Yusuf has no complaints.

They break apart, Yusuf marveling at the ease with which he can kiss Nicolo in public, glad for the poem he wrote centuries ago that brought them here (pushing away, as always, the anxiety that once Andy makes up her mind, Nicolo will know everything about him, Nicolo might hate him, Nicolo might think he’s insane, Nicolo might accept him and  _ die anyway  _ because that is what people do)

His eyes are on Nicolo’s face, his palm cupping his strong jaw, which is how he misses the person approaching them until they are only ten feet away, and already calling out.

“Nick?”

Nicolo freezes and something cool slips behind his eyes, like he’s turned off the lights. He straightens up, not pulling away from Yusuf; luckily, their hands are still entwined from their kiss, and he makes no move to drop Yusuf’s hand.

It’s a priest. Young, not even thirty, and handsome in a boyish way with a shock of red hair. 

“Nick!” He’s beaming at Nicolo, and Yusuf pushes off the wall, watching Nicolo’s face warily.

There’s something detached there, a little eerie, but he doesn’t look unhappy to see the other man. Maybe  _ worried,  _ but Nicolo typically looks, on some level, worried.

“Tom.” Nicolo greets him evenly, a distant smile on his face; he does let go of Yusuf’s hand, but only to shake hands with the priest. “Oh, apologies -- Father Thomas.”

Tom waves a hand at that, still grinning and turns to Yusuf expectantly.

“This is Dr. Joseph Jones,” Nicky says after a small pause. “My boyfriend.” 

To Tom’s credit, he doesn’t pause. “Great to meet you.” He shakes hands with Yusuf and his hands are warm and pleasantly dry despite the humid morning; there is no hint of animosity in his eyes when Yusuf looks into them, only a cheerful sort of interest.

“Doctor?” He says when they’ve let go and Nicolo has staunchly slipped his hand back into Yusuf’s. It feels like an anchor, perhaps. “I heard you were getting your PhD, Nick!”

“Still getting it,” Nicolo says. “Joe is an art professor.”

“That’s really great.” Tom sounds like he means it, and his smile doesn’t fade even as Nicolo continues to hold himself a little awkwardly; Yusuf angles his body ever so slightly in front of Nicolo, wondering if he should be the jackass and abruptly end the conversation, but Tom continues on:

“I really -- I miss seeing you. At Mass.” Tom’s eyes flick down the street, and Yusuf glances over to see older priests talking at a stall with a Polish butcher. “I know … I can’t imagine what you have been through, Nick, but … know that I’m always here.”

“Confession?” Nicolo asks, his voice slightly brittle.

Tom’s eyes soften, and his smile slips away. “As your friend, not your priest,” Tom says gently. “It’s wonderful to see you’ve found someone, though.” He touches Nicolo’s arm with a familiarity that oddly makes Yusuf’s chest ache, and then he smiles one last time at them. “I hate to say  _ you know where to find me,  _ but …” He shrugs. “I don’t exactly have a Facebook.”

“Me either,” Nicolo says quickly, and then they both laugh; it’s a real laugh from Nicolo, Yusuf notices, and his shoulders are relaxing slightly, although he does glance over to the older priests. “I -- I’ll be seeing you?”

“I hope so.” Tom nods with another smile. “I’ll be praying for you as you finish your studies. Best of luck, Nick.”

And then he’s gone, and Nicolo stands there for a moment, staring into space.

“Nicolo?” Yusuf asks softly. “Nico, tesoro, what--”

“Not here,” Nicolo mumbles, his mouth stiff. “Not --” he jerks his head down the side street, and they walk away together, Nicolo’s shoulders near his ears again.

He doesn’t relax until they’re in his apartment, the door locked behind them; he sags into the offered embrace when Yusuf holds his arms open, and they sway together for a long moment, Yusuf kissing his hair idly. 

They settle on the bed, Nicolo’s gaze still distant as he picks at the stray threads on his comforter; Yusuf watches him for a long time before saying, hesitantly:

“Did you leave seminary because … they found out--”

“No.” Nicolo shakes his head. “Most people knew I was gay. I didn’t hide it. We -- I mean, all priests are called to celibacy, and they said as long as I didn’t make a habit of telling parishioners -- because most priests don’t talk about their sexuality with parishioners -- it …” Nicolo shrugs again. “No. I didn’t leave because I was gay.”

Then, he tilts his head and hums. “Well. Even before I left, I was … struggling with the idea of serving a Church that would … condemn me because of who I was, if I chose to act on that part of myself. I must have been … thirteen? Twelve? The first time I confessed to a priest that I had sexual thoughts about another boy.” His laugh is mirthless. “You can imagine how well I was counseled over that.”

Nicolo reaches over and touches Yusuf’s thigh; it’s then that Yusuf realizes they hadn’t been touching at all. “I can’t tell you how much it means that you’ve never … judged me for a lack of experience,” Nicolo says slowly. “Or pushed me, or asked me for more -- it … it sounds silly, but even when I knew I was gay, I had always hoped that if I lost my virginity, it would be to my husband.” 

He laughs again, bitter now. “Like it would make a difference to God.” He buries his face in his hands then and doesn’t speak; while he doesn’t move beyond that, Yusuf still feels like he’s pulled away.

“Do you really think your god hates you for being gay?” Yusuf asks, frowning already. 

“No.” Nicolo emerges at that, bleary-eyed and blinking; he looks over at Yusuf, and Yusuf can’t see any hint of deceit. He speaks confidently. “I have not thought that in a long time; if God created all in his image, if he created each soul with a purpose, why would he hate me for his own design?” Nicolo shakes his head with a soft smile. “It is all … very hard to explain I think. Many contradictions, but one feeling,” he gestures vaguely to his chest and then sighs. 

“Tom was a good friend,” he says after a pause. “He doesn’t know why I left, and he tried to reach out after I did.”

“Why did you leave?” Yusuf asks, curious to the last.

Nicolo does stiffen at that, and he looks down at his hands. “Please don’t ask.”

Yusuf reaches out slowly and puts his hand on Nicolo’s shoulder. “I won’t.”

Nodding, Nicolo covers his hand with his own, and eventually uses the contact to leverage them down to the bed, their arms wrapped around each other, noses touching; Yusuf watches as Nicolo drifts off to sleep, and although he rarely gives himself time to be  _ idle,  _ he realizes that he, too, is exhausted, and falls asleep as well, calmed even in slumber by the sound of Nicolo breathing.

* * *

After weeks of planning, Nicky ends up confessing his love to Joe entirely by accident.

Joe’s wearing a paint-flecked t-shirt and loose jeans and is eating whole grain toast with one hand while flipping through the newspaper with his other; Nicky’s got his feet propped up on the chair opposite him, and May sunlight filters through the pretty window in Joe’s breakfast nook.

“This fucking asshole,” Joe mutters, spewing crumbs slightly as he gestures at a photo of Donald Trump. “This cheeto-crusted  _ infant. _ ”

“What’s he done now?” Nicky asks mildly, eating a bite of egg and looking up from his Twitter feed. 

“Ugh. Does it matter?” Joe tosses the paper to the other end of the table as though it will burn him to touch it a moment longer. “Oh, that looks good!” He points at the cheesy omelette Nicky spent a torturous ten seconds flipping properly.

“It is good,” Nicky says peacefully, looking back at his phone. 

A moment later, a fork enters his line of vision. And steals a bite of his omelette. 

“Joe!” Nicky gasps, trying to snag the bite back, but it disappears inside Joe’s smiling mouth. “My  _ eggs,  _ Joe!”

“Delicious,” Joe declares, licking his lower lip and smirking. “ … needs ketchup, though.”

Nicky pretends to gag at the thought. “Disgusting.”

“Hmm?” Joe tries to scoop another piece of egg, and Nicky blocks him, parrying the thrust as though they’re swordfighting. Eventually, Joe plays dirty and darts underneath Nicky’s attempts to block and steals the entire plate, giggling as he hauls it towards himself and takes another bite of egg.

“You’re lucky I love you,” Nicky says, all fondness and warmth while he shakes his head.

And then his eyes widen and he stares into the cracks of time and space because  _ he did not mean to say that out loud. Maybe Joe did not hear that. _

Joe stops chewing and stares at him. “What?” He asks, choking a little bit on the omelette. He waves off Nicky’s worried hands at his back and takes a sip of orange juice. “I’m sorry, but  _ what _ ?”

_ Okay, Joe heard that. _

“Um …” Nicky tries to think of what to say, but his brain, per usual, comes up with nothing.

_ Thanks, brain. Great work. _

_ Prego, Nicolo. _

Nicky winces at the lack of Good Advice rattling around in his brain and then stares at the dark wood of the breakfast table while he mumbles, “I love you.”

“Nico?”

“I was saying,” Nicky clears his throat and tries to look at Joe, but it’s a little blinding and the world has halos everywhere, probably because he’s about to do something double mortifying, like cry, “that I love you.”

Joe does not laugh at him, which is probably The Worst Scenario his brain could come up with; Joe also does not nod and say  _ thank you!  _ which is something Nicky saw on a sitcom once, and very much does not want to experience himself. He doesn’t change the topic, which would also be terrible, or pretend to faint, which is something an old friend of Nicky’s once did in high school during an unwanted prom proposal.

Instead of doing any of that, Joe leans forward, eyes shining and breathes, “ _ really? _ ” as though Nicky has expressed some great, wonderful secret of the universe to him.

Nicky nods, lips pressed together to stop anything else stupid from tumbling out, like  _ can I have your babies?  _ (which is something he said whilst tipsy to River  _ once,  _ only  _ one time  _ did he confess wanting to have Dr. Jones’s babies because they  _ would  _ be smart and they  _ would  _ have great hair, and that’s all, River, stop laughing!).

Joe stands and comes around to Nicky’s chair at the table; Nicky pushes out, humming curiously as Joe approaches, and a second later, Joe clambers into his lap, beaming the whole time, his hands soft on his face.

“You love me?” Joe repeats, somehow younger than he was a few minutes ago. “You really do?”

“Yes.” Nicky wraps his hands around Joe’s legs as he settles over his lap, and tries not to blush too furiously at suddenly having a lapful of beautiful professor. “Of course I do--”

“I love you,” Joe says with enough warmth to outdo the sun, and Nicky feels a strange hop-skip in his chest, like he’s missed a step going down the stairs. 

“What?” It’s his turn to blink incredulously. “But  _ why? _ ”

Joe only laughs and kisses him; Nicky feels drunk on it, kissing Joe, and they make no move to push away from the table for quite some time, both of them laughing instead of breathing whenever they break apart.

As far as mornings go, Nicky’s never had a better one: he wishes he could freeze time and stay in this moment, never aging, never having to let go of Joseph Jones.

He wishes they could be like this, forever.

* * *

They end up in Yusuf’s bed that night, Nicolo laughing as bright as it is nervous. His kisses taste like mint and cream, and Yusuf drinks them in greedily, his fingers leaving small marks on his hips as they wrestle each other to the mattress. 

Nicolo sits up and grabs the back of his own shirt to haul it over his head, his pale skin mottled by moonlight, patches of darkness cutting across his ribs, blooming over his soft stomach from the branches that scrape against the window and drag shadows across the room. 

He looks otherworldly like this, his eyes near-glass in the half light, and Yusuf nearly forgets that they both really exist for a moment, his mind initially only able to handle the sight of half-naked Nicolo when it’s in  _ theory  _ not in practice.

Then, Nicolo tugs on Yusuf’s shirt, pulling him up, both of them laughing when his collar catches on his hair, but then Nicolo’s hands frame his face and he kisses him until Yusuf’s sure he’s out of air (he’s had worth deaths). 

“I love you,” Yusuf tells him when they separate for air, and Nicolo blushes, a faint lilac across his cheeks, spilling down his chest, in the silvery moonlight, and Yusuf’s chest aches with it, with how much he loves this man.

They kiss a while longer, Yusuf groaning when the wiry hair on Nicolo’s chest scrapes against his nipples, Nicolo groaning when Yusuf bites his lower lip while dragging the backs of his nails along his spine. 

In all honesty, Yusuf would be content with this, forever, some blissful eternity spent kissing Nicolo, each kiss thrilling him in ways he’d forgotten how to be thrilled, but then Nicolo rolls his hips, and -

\-- And it’s far too late at night for them to be getting phone calls, or for Nicolo to have to run to a class, or for something human like hunger to interrupt them, and --

“Are you sure?” Yusuf asks hazily when Nicolo sits up and fumbles with his belt buckle. 

Nicolo nods, his fingers clumsy as he pulls the belt free from the loops of his jeans, his eyes locked on Yusuf’s. “Very sure.”

Yusuf sets his fingertips to the fine hair that peeks out from Nicolo’s boxers, the soft dark golden fuzz that trails up to his navel; the skin there is soft and feels stretched thin, tremors of Nicolo’s precious heartbeat palpable to Yusuf’s gentle touch. 

“I would not want you to do anything you were not comfortable with,” Yusuf murmurs. A sudden grief cuts through him. “I don’t want you to regret anything.”

“I could not regret it, if it were you.” Nicolo’s hands leave the fly of his jeans, now unbuttoned, and go to cup Yusuf’s jaw. “Tesoro.” A thumb drags along the edge of his beard, and Yusuf closes his eyes and tilts his chin into his touch.

“What if … what if there were things you did not know about me?” Yusuf asks, his voice cracking.

He is a coward; he cannot open his eyes for this. He is a coward, and he is lucky Nicolo does not deny him his touch here, but keeps holding him tenderly, his legs on either side of his hips, his palm against his jaw. 

“There are things you do not know about me,” Nicolo points out. He leans down and kisses the other side of Yusuf’s jaw, sliding his lips to his ear. “But I know that I love you -- and you say you love me.”

“I do,” Yusuf wishes he didn’t sound so broken when he says it, “I have loved you for what feels like an eternity, Nicolo.”

“Then love me,” Nicolo whispers, pulling away, his hands shifting down to nervously pet at Yusuf’s chest. “And let me love you.”

Yusuf opens his eyes at last to see Nicolo sitting astride him, and he nods, watching the ghost of a smile pass over Nicolo’s face. He pulls away and tugs his pants down, kicking them off along the floor, somewhere to be re-discovered later, and Yusuf removes his own pants with a little less dignity. 

It’s not his fault: he can see all of Nicolo now, as his brave, darling Nicolo had removed everything when he stood. His cock is half-hard, and curves very slightly to one side. Surprisingly, he is also cut, and even in the moonlight Yusuf can tell that Nicolo’s flesh desires him -- the head of his cock is ruddy, the red darker than even the blush on Nicolo’s chest, fading along the shaft of his sizeable member.

He looks like a statue of Michelangelo come to life; he looks like Galatea stepping off her pedestal into the open, begging arms of Pygmalion. 

Nicolo’s hands are curled to his chest, the only thing that betrays his anxiety; a knee goes to the edge of the mattress, his cock swinging slightly at the motion. Yusuf watches it hungrily, beyond the eyes of an artist admiring beauty, beyond a lover watching his beloved. 

It feels like worship, he thinks. It feels like adoration.

(He has managed nine hundred years with limited blasphemy, and the sight of Nicolo naked before him has rendered him incapable of schooling his thoughts)

Nicolo’s eyes are as hungry as Yusuf’s, but there’s a shyness there, a shyness that quiets the roar inside Yusuf’s mind to lean forward and swallow Nicolo’s cock to the root, the urge to pull him into bed and roll him to his stomach and lick at his assuredly perfect asshole, fucking him with his tongue until he is wet and pliant and deliciously wrung out --

He holds out his hand while sitting up, and Nicolo takes it with a trembling smile. 

“This is enough,” Yusuf assures him, surprising himself with the depth of that honesty. “Looking upon you, it’s -- your body … it awakens a passion in me that I’d forgotten how to handle--”

Nicolo, to his surprise, laughs. “You’re quoting the poem at me, Joe,” he teases, letting himself be pulled forward until he straddles Yusuf’s thighs. He hovers slightly over them, as though afraid of sitting down (no doubt out of politeness, knowing Nicolo).

Yusuf smiles at Nicolo before cursing at himself -- he  _ is  _ quoting the poem. The poem by forgotten al-Kaysani, who even  _ Yusuf  _ had forgotten wasn’t supposed to be  _ him.  _

Still. 

He tugs Nicolo down to kiss him again, murmuring the poem in Siculo-Arabic, the long-abandoned vowels dripping off his tongue before he slips it between Nicolo’s holy lips:

_ “Oh, how the sun loves the moon, and wishes to kiss the back of his neck at the cusp of dawn _ ,” he murmurs, before kissing Nicolo again, both of their breaths hitching as their cocks slide against each other for the first time, a fuzzy shock of contact that sends desire rolling deep in Yusuf’s stomach. 

“ _ His heart is a fountain that I long to drink from, _ ” Yusuf whispers, breaking away to kiss Nicolo’s jaw, but Nicolo has the same idea, and uses his superior leverage in the moment to nuzzle kisses into Yusuf’s neck. Yusuf digs his fingers into Nicolo’s hips, the tips of them finding the soft flesh of his perfect ass, and he gasps the next line. “ _ It is not water that he offers me, but kindness in an unkind world.” _

_ “My love has a kiss that thrills me, _ ” Yusuf continues when Nicolo pulls back and touches his jaw gently. “ _ His body awakens a passion in me that I knew not of before his touch-- _ ”

“Yusuf.” Nicolo laughs and leans down to press a kiss to his lips this time. “Yusuf, I don’t know what you’re saying--”

“I love you,” Yusuf answers, and he feels Nicolo smile against his mouth.

It’s simple to grab the small bottle of lubricant from his bedside drawer; he directs Nicolo to find it, and they make a mess of the sheets and themselves to pour it over their fingers. 

Yusuf trembles the first time Nicolo wraps his fingers around his cock, wetting it with strokes that begin nervously but become rapturously confident, Nicolo’s eyes wide and mouth open as he touches him steadily. His breath shivers from him as Yusuf echoes his touch, stroking Nicolo’s cock and admiring the weight of it in his palm, the velvet smooth of it both tempting and soothing.

It’s Nicolo who asks, “can we do this?” and timidly wraps his fingers around both their cocks at once --

Yusuf wants to make a joke about how this is how they did it in Pompeii, if what Andy says is true, but he  _ doesn’t  _ want to mention Andy right now, and also he  _ really  _ doesn’t want to mention how Andy would know about Pompeii right now, but then there’s the heady push-pull of their cocks sliding against each other in the near-perfect pressure of Nicolo’s grip, and Nicolo throws his head back to make a lovely line of skin from his groin to the tip of his chin as he pants and writhes over Yusuf.

“It feels nice, doesn’t it?” Yusuf murmurs as he notices Nicolo’s thighs tremble; he tucks the sight away for later, for information on how Nicolo looks before he comes. 

Nicolo nods and swallows, a dry, pitiful noise that Yusuf would take pity on if he himself were not so wrecked by the sight of Nicolo’s hips moving above his own; because he cannot offer pity and only seeks release for them both, he moves Nicolo’s hand out of the way gently and takes over, relishing the sight and sound of slick moving flesh in his fingers. 

He slips his free hand in the small space between Nicolo’s inner thigh and his own, and touches lightly at Nicolo’s balls. “May I?” he asks, feeling oddly polite for the noises that emerge from the lubed friction of their cocks frotting together.

“Mhm.” Nicolo’s hands come down and grip Yusuf’s sides for a moment, spasming a little as he chokes out a tiny apology in Italian, no doubt thinking that he bruised him. 

(And isn’t that a thought, Yusuf thinks as he starts to stroke firm fingers and thumb over Nicolo’s delicate sac, the thought of Nicolo pinning him down and marking him thoroughly, leaving love-bites and bruises littered across his chest to show the world they belonged together; isn’t the idea of  _ permanence  _ so fucking tempting it threatens to rip him in half--)

“I’m -- I’m --” Nicolo whines a little and shakes his head, a punch-drunk lustful haze in his eyes as his mouth still hangs open; he ducks his head and watches the heads of their cocks slip away and reappear in Yusuf’s loose fist, “Yusuf, please, I’m --”

“Come for me,” Yusuf answers, near-drunk himself on the smell of their arousal, the slippery desire that spools through his stomach and slips between his fingers in beads of shimmering silver, “come for me, tesoro--”

“H-h-” Nicolo drops his head and with a sweet, almost impish smile for how badly he’s shaking apart, he manages to say, “habibi, ana baħibbak--”

And it’s clumsy, and a little mispronounced, but it catches Yusuf so off-guard that it feels as though shards of glass, made entirely of pleasure and grief and something larger than anything he’s ever seen or felt, break apart inside of him. 

Yusuf cries out as he spills white-hot onto his stomach, and Nicolo finishes a half-second later with a punched-out groan, bowing over Yusuf as their come mingles on his skin.

Panting, Yusuf grabs Nicolo around the waist and hauls him down for a kiss, his toes curling and uncurling while he shakes his head, at a loss for words for a long time, so he only kisses him and kisses him.

Until: “where did you learn that?” Yusuf asks, wonderment like stars in his eyes as he gazes up at Nicolo, the mess on his stomach now spread evenly between them, and mucking up the nice sheets something dreadful.

Nicolo giggles and shakes his head. “Google translate,” he confesses. “And YouTube. I was positive I didn’t say it right--”

“You said it perfectly,” Yusuf assures him, and with a smile brighter than the moon, Nicolo ducks back down to kiss him breathless once more.

* * *

“I expect results, Mr. Copley, when I pay as well as I do.”

James looks up at the board in front of him, sighing heavily through his nose; he fiddles with the ring on his left hand, the ring he’s never been able to take off, and he shakes his head at the tinny voice over the speakers.

“I understand, Mr. Merrick. I had thought I had a lead in the Frenchman, and I was wrong. I can get you your evidence--”

“I don’t  _ want  _ evidence.” Stephen Merrick is a child, and James Copley wouldn’t be bothering with him  _ if  _ it didn’t mean millions of lives could be saved.

(He pushes down the dark, awful feeling that perhaps this isn’t his fight, that perhaps his wife would frown at him if she knew that he was willing to hand over four people who, by all accounts, only ever helped humanity, four people who would be tested and shocked and experimented on until cures were found. But, the thought fizzles out because his wife  _ isn’t  _ here to tell him that: and isn’t that the whole point?)

“I want a solution, and I want my stock to go up, and I want  _ results. _ ” Merrick barks something at someone else on the other end of the call, and then returns his attention to Copley, whose eyes are tracking new patterns, new photos that he only just received today. “Convince at least  _ half  _ of those four to come to my lab by this winter, or I’ll expect a refund. And if you’re holding back due to some ridiculous notion of compassion for these creatures: remember, I won’t play  _ nearly  _ so nice when I go to fetch them myself.”

Copley barely notices when Merrick hangs up: he takes a step towards his board and traces a line backwards through the decades -- not many decades for this move.

He starts at a photo taken the other day by one of his trusted associates, a street photo with Nile Freeman (turned immortal ca. 1989, born 1965), who has her arm wrapped around another student at the college they conned their way into.

He’s young, an Italian with American citizenship; Copley hadn’t dug too far into him beyond realizing that he was, in fact, born in 1990, and he almost became a priest. Nobody of interest other than being friends with interesting people.

Specifically, he’s best friends with Nile Freeman, former US military, killed in Panama and resurrected shortly thereafter; best friends with Nile, and … dating Yusuf al-Kaysani, immortal  _ at least  _ since 1450, judging by a painting he’d found that looked  _ remarkably  _ like the man, commissioned by a grateful nobleman after al-Kaysani had saved their family from a horrific fire.

Nicolo Genova had barely sparked enough interest for a background check, but he’s in many photos with Freeman, and in many photos with Yusuf, and …

His fingers itch a little as he follows a line through the last few years, ending in 2007. His eyes widen when he finds the photo.

A boating accident on the Chesapeake; Andy, or Andrea, or according to some borderline mythological accounts, Andromache, had been there that day. Not connected to anything, as far as Copley could tell. He’d dug into what he could at the agency, realized there were no active watches on the Genova family, nothing of interest, no connection to the mob, no outward issues that warranted an international interest.

A boating accident that left five dead, with one boy pulled from the water; Copley sees the waterlogged, distant photo of Andy, head down as she studies the limp body of a young boy, seventeen years old; another photo taken a second later by a girl with an enterprising interest in documentation, a few years too early for Instagram, where Andy looks up and sees the crowd gathering.

She’d run from the scene, per the accounts he’d been able to drag from police accounts and interviews; pulled a boy from the river, breathed life back into him, and  _ ran  _ before anyone could give her credit. The only reason it had drawn Copley’s attention in the first place was because of the mild internet interest in a woman who’d run from being a hero, and the sheer fact that she had swum  _ four miles  _ back to shore with the young boy in tow.

He hadn’t realized  _ who  _ she had saved, not until he was on the phone with Merrick and his mind had drifted. He’d found the case a year ago after all, a year ago when the last name  _ Genova  _ meant nothing to him, and had slipped from his exhausted mind like water between cupped hands.

(“Distance like that, you’d expect one or both to drown,” a cop who answers the phone will say when Copley calls a few minutes after he hangs up on Merrick, “weirdest thing. She didn’t want nothing to do with all of that, neither. Just left the boy there, choking still, his parents dead in the water, and -- hey, didya say you were writing an article on this? Do y’all need my na--” and Copley will hang up and rest his head in his hands as he thinks about the implications of all of this)

It was Nicolo Genova that day in the water, the same Nicolo Genova smiling at him from photos from the last half-year, wrapped up in the lives of at least  _ two  _ of the people that could save the world, if Copley could just get them to see reason (he’d been so  _ sure  _ of the Frenchman, but the  _ second  _ he suggested M. Booker bring Nile Freeman with him to the meeting with Merrick, Booker had balked, cursed him out in French, and has avoided him ever since).

Nicolo Genova -- who, perhaps, brings the number of immortals in the world up to  _ five.  _

“There’s another one,” Copley whispers to himself, writing a post-it note and sticking it over the photo of Nicolo Genova jogging across campus, textbooks clutched in his arms as Nile laughs and runs ahead of him. 

He stands back and looks at his board with new eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: Copley is WILDLY ahead of himself. Nicky did NOT die at 17. He’s definitely 28 and fully mortal.
> 
> Alright I'm gonna be honest with you, the next few chapters get ANGSTY and sad and awful and violent and difficult to get through so ... let's all buckle in together? I guess?? Please don't hate me !?!?!?
> 
> I would love to hear your thoughts, and your concerns, and your incoherent screams, and anything you have to say!!! (You really, really do not need to comment on the smut if that is not your jam, but if there are other things that interest you, pls let me know!)


	7. Summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Nicky prepares for the end of his program, he also prepares to tell Joe about the secret he counts as his darkest. But, Nicky's past (and Joe's own secrets) might not be the most dangerous thing looming over them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO PLEASE PLEASE READ THE **WARNINGS** FOR THIS CHAPTER
> 
> (And, sorry this took four or five days, not even sure how many! Work was absolutely awful this week and I spent every night curled up in bed, crying and watching Spongebob, and after you read this chapter you'll see why I wasn't ... pumped to write it while I was already sad, but hey it's Friday! So come be sad with me)
> 
> IF sex abuse (non-graphic/in the past/mainly implied) perpetrated by a priest does NOT trigger you, some of the warnings might be **spoilery** if that needs to be said?
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Frank discussions of death/mortality
> 
> VIOLENCE (in the past, mostly implied/referenced) against an older person (they def. deserved it if its any consolation)  
> In the _July_ section:  
>  **The tag "Criticism of the Catholic Church" comes in big-time**  
>  **Sexual Abuse** references to the sex abuse scandals of the Catholic church  
> (Non-graphic, implied mainly, but the perpetrator was a priest with multiple young victims)  
> Off-screen **suicide** of a young man, in the past. Friend of Nicky's, not directly named in the fic so far. Non-graphic  
>  **IF YOU NEED TO SKIP ANY OF THE ABOVE** at the section titled "July" stop reading after the phrase "He was a monster" and resume reading after the line break/where Nile/River shows back up.
> 
> Intense feelings of **paranoia** and of being watched pervade the chapter.

(June)

The air tastes different in the early summer; still light, but with a growing sense of the heat to come. Humidity always comes a little easier to the District, sticky and a little cloying in the mornings even as the sun sits below the horizon and drags hazy purple through the night sky. Thunder’s a distant rumble building up the coast, the threat of rainclouds slowly growing beyond the Potomac; but in those first weeks of June, summer comes slowly, looming and carrying with it the promise of minimal work and freedom from obligation.

Nicky’s dissertation does not seem to care about the pleasant weather and lack of educational obligations. At this point, his paper goes beyond obligation and is more the shadow constantly kicking him in the ass, demanding a little more time, a little more translation, _just one more page, Nicolo, come on, you can do it._

It stares at him when he opens his laptop; it haunts him in his sleep as he dreams of standing in front of the committee and forgetting every word of English he’s ever learned; it sneaks up behind him when he could be doing far more pleasant things, like eating ice cream with River or making out with Joe or sitting in the sunlight and letting his skin darken to a light tan. 

He finds himself bartering with it at two a.m. as he chews on his fingernails and mutters to his ceiling about what word should go next. He also finds himself eyeing websites about cabins in Maine. He’s always wanted to go to Maine, and none of these cabins have Wi-Fi. His professors will never know where he disappeared to. The committee will not be able to find him in Maine.

Just the bobcats, the bugs, some moose, and Nicky. No computer. No dissertation. No one to ask him how far he got on his paper today.

(He will bring Joe, he reasons. He and Joe can spend the next decade holed up in a little cabin in the woods of Maine; who knows, in ten years, Nicky might finally grow used to the sound Joe makes when he spills, hot and lush and brittle-sweet, over Nicky’s fist)

So, Nicky plans his escape from civilization, and tries to enjoy the scraps of summer that he can with the end of his program hanging over his head.

One such reprieve comes when Joe coaxes him to go see a movie in the middle of the day; Nicky can’t resist when Joe smiles at him, and after he’s been dragged onto a bus so they can head out to Georgetown, Nicky finds himself in a mostly empty movie theater, watching some incomprehensible Marvel bullshit. It’s boring, and he ends up slipping popcorn between Joe’s lips, knees tucked up as much as he can manage it under his chin, the armrest pulled up between them.

“Nicolo.” Joe murmurs his name without taking his eyes off the screen where some sexy guy is telling another sexy guy about how serious it is now that the big not-sexy purple guy is coming to murder them all. “Nicolo--”

“Hm?” Nicky sucks movie theater butter off his thumb, and that motion does catch Joe’s attention.

Not for long; Joe goes back to watching the screen, and he mutters: “I think they’re all going to die, Nicolo.”

“That would be a really dumb superhero movie,” Nicky decides.

Slightly defeated, he drops his feet back to the sticky-gross floor and nuzzles into Joe’s side, hmphing through some more ridiculous dialogue (Why does no one listen to the smart girl? He wonders. The smart girl has much better technology, and her hair is very nice, and she reminds him a little bit of River, in that they both have very nice braids, and are much smarter than everyone around them, and are sort of silly, but still give off the attitude that they know more than you and they can do much more than you).

At the end of the movie, half of everyone dies, and Joe makes some indignant noises, as though he hadn’t predicted that exact thing.

Nicky tries not to yawn when they walk back out into the dazzling sunlight. He fails.

Joe gives him a grin and squeezes his hand. “Did that tire you out, Nicolo?”

“Blergh.” Nicky shrugs off the stupor of the chilly movie theater, and they jog across K street, so they can walk along the waterfront. “It wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It was definitely very good!” Joe argues. “The special effects were very nice.”

“The green girl shouldn’t have died.”

“Gamora.”

“Yes, her.” Nicky rolls his eyes. “They shouldn’t have killed her. The raccoon would have been easier to kill.”

They don’t talk again until they settle into the grass facing the river. Joe’s legs sprawl out immediately, and he rests his weight on his hands, face tilted up to the sun as his foot bounces back and forth like a metronome. Nicky’s dizzy with it, suddenly, dizzy with how much he loves Joe, who’s a genius and an artist and a poet and a lover of really terrible mainstream superhero movies.

“I love you,” Nicky declares, not feeling the need to avoid saying it. The smile Joe gives him is twice as dazzling as the early afternoon sun off the water.

He drops his head into Joe’s lap and spreads out perpendicular to Joe’s legs, nestling in until he’s properly comfortable. Part of him remembers that they’re in public, and his face is very close to Joe’s dick, but he’s hoping it’s borderline respectable enough that they won’t get called on it, but borderline flirtatious enough that Joe will want him to put his face near his dick again later when the’yre in private and not wearing so many stupid layers.

(“You’re so thirsty,” River had laughed when Nicky had shown her a photo of Joe doing pull-ups with no shirt on. Nicky had only moaned until River splashed some water at him, and the droplets had done nothing to quench the inevitable horniness that came from being confronted with half-dressed, sweaty Joseph Jones).

Joe’s fingers start to play with his hair, which Nicky’s growing out to a much floppier length (namely because it feels so nice when Joe plays with it). He closes his eyes and hums his contentment, letting his mind drift. 

His dissertation hisses at him a little from the back of his mind, but Nicky considers taking it out back and putting it out of its misery. _I will move to Maine,_ he tells it fiercely. _If you do not let me snuggle my boyfriend and get laid, I_ will _quit the program._

 _Only six more months!_ The ghost of his dissertation hisses.

Nicky’s conscious mind hisses back, and then he snorts at himself.

Joe’s fingers still in his hair. “What’s so funny, habibi?”

“Nothing.” Nicky cracks an eye open to smile up at Joe; the sun’s coming through the trees above them like a halo around Joe’s head. “Hayati.”

He can practically feel the radiance of Joe’s smile at the term. 

“I love you,” Joe tells him, and Nicky nuzzles the hand near his face, so content he could purr like a preening kitten.

He closes his eyes again when Joe goes back to stroking his hair.

“I might fall asleep,” Nicky informs him primly. “That movie was so boring, and this feels so nice.”

“We could have left the movie, tesoro,” Joe laughs. It’s a tender sound, to go with the gentleness of his touch.

“No.” Nicky shakes his head slowly, not wanting to displace Joe’s hand. “You were enjoying it. God knows why.”

“I like superhero movies. They’re … impractical.”

“We can agree on that.” Nicky smiles, the world plush-red behind his eyelids. “Impervious skin and flying and laser eyes. Everyone is only trying to be Superman.”

Joe gasps, offended. “Don’t tell me you’re a DC fan.”

“...I live in DC?” Nicky asks, slightly confused. Joe giggles at him, and Nicky shrugs, assuming he’s been accidentally funny. “I guess I never was interested in superheroes. Never wanted to be one, that’s for sure.”

“No?”

“No.” Nicky shakes his head. “I don’t think … all-powerful people are the answer.” He’s very drowsy now, and he’s not sure if his English is coming through clearly, so halfway through his explanation, he switches to Italian.

Joe makes the switch with him. “What do you mean?”

“There are so many problems in the world,” Nicky explains. “Problems made by normal people. Why should these super-people fix them? Wouldn’t they have super-problems?”

Surprisingly, Joe doesn’t sound like he’s humoring him; he sounds thoughtful. “I suppose so. Are you saying you wouldn't want superpowers?”

“God no.” Nicky laughs earnestly. “I have made enough mess of my life being absolutely ordinary.”

Joe stills again, and now he sounds sad. Reproachful. “You’re anything but ordinary, Nicolo.”

Nicky opens his eyes, the shift from dark to light a little painful, and he smiles up at Joe. “Thank you, tesoro.” He wants to argue against him a little, but he’s learned that arguing with Joe is like arguing with the sun.

In that they are both hot, very passionate, and disinterested in being told that they are wrong.

They smile at each other for a second, and Nicky closes his eyes once more.

“Besides. Flight? We have planes. Strength? Most people are not that strong.” He smirks a little and stretches his legs against the grass. “Immortality? No thank you.”

He can hear the distant sounds of young people partying on a boat passing by, and the sound of traffic on K Street; he can hear wind rustle the trees of the park, and he can hear the shift of grass under his jeans as he gets more comfortable.

He doesn’t hear Joe say anything. And then:

“You … wouldn’t want to live forever?” He must have been thinking it over.

Nicky shakes his head. “No. I … I don’t know. I think people wrote that into literature because they were terrified of dying.”

“And you aren’t?” Joe clears his throat. “Afraid of dying?”

This is a much more serious conversation than they’ve had in a while, probably since Nicky told him about his worst day. He sits up slowly and half-turns so he’s facing Joe. “No,” he answers honestly, flattening the back of his hair down with a nervous hand. “I guess with my anxiety, I’m afraid of a lot of things, and probably death too. But, rationally? No, I’m not. Maybe it’s because I almost did already--”

Joe winces, so Nicky moves on quickly.

“--Maybe it is a Catholic thing. Living forever in Heaven with Christ and God and the Spirit, the hope that I still might one day. We die to achieve immortality.” He shrugs. “That does not sound so terrible.”

Joe’s eyes are a million miles away, and Nicky wonders where he went to; not for the first time, he remembers how little he knows about Joe’s past. He wants to ask. He isn’t sure if it’s his place to.

“I do not want you to die,” Joe says eventually, his voice a croak. His hand twitches a little where it rests between them on the grass, and Nicky takes it immediately, folding his hands over Joe’s fingers and palm with a worried coo.

“Joe,” he says softly, “Yusuf,” when Joe can’t meet his eyes. “Yusuf, why are you so worried?” He kisses Joe’s fingers. “I’m younger than you,” he points out with a teasing smile, “you will be stuck with me for quite some time.”

Joe can barely manage a smile at him. “I just don’t know how you can be so … okay with it,” Joe admits. “I don’t know many people who are.”

“Are you?” Nicky asks, his stomach churning now from the heavy topic. “Afraid of death?”

“I’m afraid of the people I love dying.” An evasive answer, but perhaps a very telling one.

“All things have an end,” Nicky points out. He takes Joe’s hand and kisses it again, lets it smooth out to frame his jaw; he leans into Joe’s palm. “That is what makes the story so beautiful, Joe. That it ends.”

Joe’s thumb spasms on Nicky’s jaw. 

Across the park, a man with a long lens points the camera at them; Nicky frowns for a moment, but then the man takes the camera down and flips through it. He relaxes; there’d be no reason to take a photo of them, he reasons. Maybe he thought they were a nice couple, but more likely he was taking a picture of the whole park. 

He puts it out of his mind and continues to explain:

“Maybe it’s because I lost my parents the way I did, but … I don’t think I would appreciate life as much, knowing it wasn’t going anywhere.” Nicky clears his throat and wonders why Joe can’t meet his eyes, why he pulls his hand away slowly from his face.

He wants to ask. He doesn’t want to be pushy. He continues:

“You’d be like a tree whose roots keep growing, but can’t put them down anywhere, so you’d have to find some other forest. Because people would see them otherwise.” Now, Nicky stares up at the branches above them and shakes his head, frustrated with how his metaphor isn’t coming out the way he wants. “Because people aren’t trees, and after a while, other people would wonder why you stay the same, and they don’t. I’m sure it would even hurt them.”

Quiet again. And then Joe asks, “Can we go home, Nicolo?”

Nicky blinks and looks at Joe; he’s mortified to see him crying openly, tears sliding down his cheeks as he stares out at the Potomac.

“Yusuf?”

Joe doesn’t flinch away from his hand when he slips his fingers over his cheek, collecting the moisture that slips into his wonderful beard. 

“Can we go?” Joe repeats. “I just -- I want to go home.”

Nicky nods and stands, offering his hand to Joe. “Let’s go.”

They hold hands and walk home, even though it’s almost two miles, even though Joe doesn’t say another word until they’re in his house, even though Nicky feels like he’s ruined everything.

Joe still pulls him inside after him, and they lie in bed for the rest of the afternoon, Joe’s arms wrapped tightly around him as his ragged breathing slows and speeds and slows again, washing hot over the back of Nicky’s neck.

He doesn’t think about his dissertation once.

* * *

(Later, when the sun has set, and Joe still holds Nicky even though his stomach is starting to growl, Joe asks him a halting question so soft, _so so so soft_ , that Nicky assumes Joe thinks he’s asleep.

“What would you do if you knew everything about me?” Joe whispers. “I know you want to know, and I want to tell you, but -- I’m so afraid, Nicolo. What would you do, if it was something unforgivable?”

Nicky’s heart clenches when he thinks about the _unforgivable something_ that he’s done, the reason why he should logically be afraid of dying, afraid of Judgement.

The answer comes easily, even if he isn’t sure Joe wants an answer. 

“I would forgive you,” Nicky says simply taking Joe’s hand from his hip and bringing it to his mouth to kiss. “And I would love you anyway, Yusuf.”

Joe’s breath staggers. 

Nicky turns in his embrace to hold him and kiss him until his breath staggers for a better reason)

* * *

(July)

“I want to tell you about something.”

Nicky sits across from Yusuf in the height of summer; the heat has arrived and it stifles the city. Even sound feels muffled, tamped down by the oppressive humidity. Children are too exhausted by it to even set off firecrackers now that the national holiday has passed, and dogs lie in puddles of shade, puddles of their own slobber, trying to catch a break from the icky-gross-hotness of it all.

Joe looks unfairly unruffled by the heat; Nicky’s cheeks are bright red from their walk home from dinner, where they’d eaten spicy food, and sat outside in the heat, and then walked home. His anxiety is making his cheeks flush as well. 

But they’d passed by Saint Matthew’s again, and the bell had run eight times to announce the hour, and Nicky had felt each one lay heavy on his spine, growing heavier still as they walked through the quiet evening back to Joe’s house. 

He’d felt like a thousand eyes had been on them, and his anxiety had worsened the paranoia as though the eyes of God himself were on Nicky, urging him to be open and trusting with Joe.

Now, Joe pauses where he’s grabbing two glasses of water to look over at him with a frown. “Oh?” There’s a line of worry between his eyes, and Nicky scoots out a chair at the table, the one right next to him, and tries to smile encouragingly.

“About -- me,” he says softly. “About … why I am not a priest.”

Something like surprise flits across Joe’s face, but he comes to the table with the water and sits next to Nicky. Without prompting, he holds his hand out on the table, and Nicky takes it with a grateful inhale, sliding their fingers together and squeezing. He needs an anchor for this, he supposes.

His heart rams its way into his throat, and it’s only Joe’s thumb across the back of his knuckles that keeps him from bolting for the door.

“I want to be honest with you,” Nicky says quietly, wondering if Joe can also hear the tremor in his voice. “I want -- I want us to be able to tell each other everything.”

 _I want you to feel like you can tell me everything,_ he doesn’t say, but he can’t help but think of that evening three weeks ago when Joe had held him so desperately after admitting how afraid he was that Nicky would leave him if he knew about his past.

(Nicky’s past has more darkness in it than Joe might suspect; short of murder or the like, Nicky thinks grimly there’s nothing Joe could say that would scare him off -- he needs him to know that)

“I didn’t always want to be a priest,” Nicky begins. “I was a .. badly behaved boy. An altar boy, yes, good at school, but I liked to play pranks, and I liked to curse and learned to smoke when I was sixteen--”

Joe smiles at that detail, and Nicky snorts. “My mother didn’t find that so charming, trust me. I cared about my relationship with God, but I always cared more about school and my books and my friends.” He stares at their entwined hands. “And then … and then my parents died. And I thought an angel had saved me.”

“Andy,” Joe says gently. Nicky nods, his lips pressed together.

When he can speak again, he does. “I -- I thought it was a sign from God. It was … the waves were all around me. I couldn’t see or think, I was just so, so afraid.” _Dark, cold, terrifying --_ he shudders, and Joe leans forward to kiss his hands. 

Nicky smiles at him, and leans forward as Joe’s sitting up so they can press their foreheads together for a moment. 

“When the angel -- when Andy saved me, I woke up alone on the beach and I thought of a story from Mark, where Jesus sleeps as a storm almost drowns his disciples. They wake him, and he sits up, watches them panic, and then with a word, he calms the storm and tells them _why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?_ ” 

Nicky stares out across Joe’s kitchen. “I didn’t want to be afraid anymore, but I was … I was a wreck. I wanted to have faith in God. I wanted to … I wanted to thank Him for sending an angel to me when I was so afraid.”

He blinks back tears and tries not to think of himself as stupid; Andy was simply a good swimmer who found him against all odds and dragged him to shore. God might have put her in his path, but it could have been something more like coincidence.

Or destiny.

“So, I started going to church more and more. Daily Mass. Holy Hour. Daily confession. I prayed the rosary constantly as I worked through undergrad, and my college priest encouraged me to pray for discernment. I thought God was telling me to join the priesthood, so I applied to seminary.”

He’s quiet then, reflecting on being twenty-one and so confident and sure of his place in the world. It’s odd how he could be at the tail end of the same decade and feel a thousand times less sure.

Nicky isn’t sure he can step foot in a church again, but he does _miss_ it. The assurance. The confidence. The peace of mind. Faith itself.

“I enjoyed my time at seminary. I made friends, I gave myself to God. I came to know many people in my time.”

Nicky makes himself meet Joe’s eyes, and all he can see is concern; when he raises a hand to tug at his earlobe, he brushes his cheek and finds it wet. He’s been crying now, the simple release of tears that come from prodding at a scarred-over grief; he hadn’t even noticed.

“I had just become a deacon, ready to finish my last year of training, when …” Nicky falters, his voice breaking, and an inexplicable sense of defensiveness comes over him. “I have known many priests; my priest when I was a child, the priest I met when I moved here, the priest I had in college, the men who studied alongside me at seminary. They were men; some good, some mean, all pious. They were _men,_ who had a calling from Christ.”

His breath shudders painfully. “But -- but _him -_ he was a monster.”

“Nicolo?” Joe’s face is crossed in agony now, agony and something more like rage, and Nicky realizes how this must sound; he shakes his head half a dozen times and sits forward, scooting his chair a little closer to Joe as they huddle together under the warm light of the overhead lamp.

“No.” He shakes his head. “No, no, -- never me, it didn’t happen to me, Joe, don’t - don’t worry---”

Joe nods, and they lean their heads together for another moment, Nicky’s body twisted now so he’s leaning into Joe’s strong arm, needing the support.

“Not me.” Nicky releases a breath and sits up, tears in his eyes. “A -- a friend of mine.” His voice breaks painfully. “From high school. Peter. We … we used to go and get dinner together after school on Friday, when I was new to America. He was always so kind to me.” His voice shakes until it threatens to shatter. “He killed himself.”

Joe squeezes his hand tighter, and Nicky squeezes back. “He was … he was so kind. And I went to the funeral across the city, and someone there was … drunk, and saying things they shouldn’t have, but I caught the gist of it, and …” Nicky shakes his head and leans forward a little, trying to breathe.

“You can tell me the rest later,” Joe urges him, “Nico, drink something, please.”

Nicky obliges, and drinks half his glass, Joe’s hand firm but gentle on his knee, his eyes on his face the whole time.

“Do you want to--”

“No.” Nicky shakes his head. “I have to say this -- I want you to know. The worst of my past. I want you to see it.” 

Joe’s gaze is assessing, discerning, but not judgemental. Nicky takes a shuddering breath.

“I got a name before I left. And I didn’t mean to dig, but -- no, I did. I wanted to know. He was an older priest, in his sixties by that point, but he’d come to our parish when Peter was a child, and … he’d bounced between dioceses for a while, and the whole time, he’d been …” Nicky pales, not wanting to explain further.

“I understand,” Joe tells him gently. “Nicolo, you don’t have to explain what he did.”

Nicky, still grey, nods and takes a sip of water. “This was before the Vatican began to accept it all,” he explains softly. “Before Francis encouraged it to come out of the shadows. They still wanted it hidden. And -- and I confronted him anyway, that old bastard.”

He laughs, harshly, at the memory. “He denied it at first.”

_It had been before Christmas Eve, and the choir had been practicing._

_Nicky, Deacon Nick, had walked through the old church until he found himself at the office door of the old man. His knock had been hesitant but his heart was resolute._

_The man offered him a seat. A drink. A listening ear._

_His smile had barely moved when Nick denied all three offers and then haltingly explained the rumor he had heard; his need to know if it were true._

_Laughter had met his initial point, and Nick had refused to budge. That’s when the smile faded._

“He called Peter’s death a … a tragedy, but that he had _chosen_ death, and he could counsel me through the suicide of a friend if I needed it.”

_“You can’t go around flinging accusations, young man,” the older priest had told him sternly. “That isn’t how we do things--”_

_“Tell me it isn’t true,” Nick repeated stubbornly. “Tell me why anyone would lie about that--”_

_“He was always a troubled boy,” had been the calm response, “prone to dramatics, and depression, and sadly it led to his--”_

“I lost my temper.” Nicky clears his throat and looks at Joe. “I began to shout, but no one could hear it over the organ.”

_Adeste Fideles played in the background, a surreal counterpoint to the rage in Nick’s voice._

_“How many?” Nick demanded. “I saw your transfer records, I know that you’ve moved from parish to parish -- how many children?”_

_He realized then, how many children came to their own parish, the young children he met with at youth group, or helped to watch when mothers needed a break; a sick twisting cut through him._

_“Are there any now?” He asked, hoarse. “Are you still hurting--”_

_“The weakness of the flesh is between me and God,” the priest told him coldly. “I do not need to explain my sins to you, just as you do not need to--”_

“I grabbed him,” Nicky says tiredly. “I was so done with his bullshit. I …”

_If the choir hadn’t been practicing, Nick was sure he’d be in jail by the end. Blood stained his hands, and he couldn’t find an ounce of remorse for what he’d done, not after what the old man had admitted to a dozen times over in the middle of it all._

“I gave him a chance to repent when I grabbed him,” Nicky can hear how dull his own voice sounds, “after I had scared him a little. But he did not take it. All he could give me were excuses. Not guilt. Not remorse.”

He looks at Joe, wondering what he thinks. “I’d like to be able to say that I lost control,” he admits, “but I’ve never been more in control.”

“What happened?” Joe asks softly. “Did you get into trouble with the law?”

Nicky shakes his head. “Sometimes I think the only thing more powerful than the law is the Catholic Church,” he says with a grim kind of humor because _isn’t that how that whole nightmare had happened in the first place._

“They gave me the option of leaving, and they wouldn’t press charges. I had collected enough evidence that the priest was defrocked quietly.” He shakes his head weakly.

“It was a poor parish,” he spits out. “Full of recent immigrants and tired people who could not donate much. The people were _poor_ , Joe, and -- and they told me if I released the story, if it was found out--” His voice breaks and keeps on breaking, “the church would have had to close, and a whole neighborhood would be without their place of worship, and--” he closes his eyes. “I didn’t tell the press. I didn’t tell the police. I … I left.”

He cries then.

Sobs rip from him, and Joe leaves his chair to hover over him and bless him with a loving embrace he doubts he deserves.

“I-I--I’ve never t-t-told any-anyone,” he chokes out, and Joe shushes him, presses kisses to his hair; Nicky grabs onto his arms like a lifeline and doesn’t let go.

“It was an impossible decision,” Joe says a few minutes later when he’s calmed down; Joe’s brought him a fresh glass of water, and Nicky drinks it thirstily, rubbing his neck and feeling exhaustion wash over him.

“It wasn’t much of a decision after a while. God decided for us both. The man died less than a year later.” Nicky smiles humorlessly. “And earlier this year, Washington released a list of names of clergymen who were considered credibly accused of sexual abuse. His name was slipped in as an afterthought.” 

There had been no justice, Nicky thinks. Not really.

“Now you know the worst thing I’ve done,” Nicky comments, running a hand through his hair. 

“Hurting a man who was hurting children is not a terrible thing,” Joe points out, surprisingly calm for the violence Nicky just shared with him. Joe is taking this remarkably well, at least on the outside. 

Nicky shakes his head though. “Not that.” he sags a little. “I spent so long defending a church that wouldn’t defend the innocent. My inaction, my inability to see how Peter was hurting -- that is the worst thing I could have done.”

Joe takes his hand again. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Don’t we all know, on some level?” Nicky asks wearily, his eyes rimmed with red. “Can’t we, as humans, tell when something awful is happening? It’s like there should be a _sense_ for it, but there’s something weak in us, in our souls that make us turn away from it, even if it is subconscious. I wanted to tear the church down brick by brick after all that happened. But … but I didn’t. I didn’t do any _good,_ Yusuf. I … didn’t make any difference.” An errant tear slips out. “And isn’t that its own kind of evil?”

If Joe has an answer to that, he doesn’t say; he only holds Nicky’s hand quietly. After a few more minutes, Nicky drains the rest of his glass. 

“I should go,” he says, setting it on the table and half-standing.

“No.” Joe holds his hand stubbornly. “Nicolo, I know you think you’ve … scared me away somehow, but you haven’t. You really, very much haven’t, and I want you to stay --”

“I need to clear my head,” Nicky insists, and Joe stands with him, frowning and concerned. “I think I should be by myself tonight.”

Joe nods and walks him to the door, his dark brown eyes wounded, and so, so beautiful. 

Looking nervous for the first time in months about it, Joe asks for a kiss at the door as Nicky toes his shoes on.

“I wasn’t sure if you would want to,” Nicky admits, his stomach still in painful knots. “After--”

“I’ll always want to,” Joe interrupts hoarsely. “I’ll want to kiss you until the day I die.”

“Hopefully that will be a long time from now,” Nicky says with a smile that’s only slightly forced. When Joe kisses him, it becomes actually real, and they stand together for a long time before breaking apart.

Nicky can’t tell if he feels a thousand pounds heavier or lighter as he walks away, but when he turns at the corner to see if Joe’s porch light is still on, he can see Joe watching him, and it takes a lot of what’s left of his energy to continue on his way, rather than run back to Joe’s arms and the feeling of home.

As he walks through the dark street, a strangely cool breeze on the air, Nicky develops an overwhelming sense of being watched. He shivers and wraps his arms around himself, regretting the t-shirt; he glances over his shoulder as he ducks down a side-street, trying to cut some time off of his walk.

He swears there’s someone behind him, and his heart leaps into his throat. Luckily, he has long legs, and he knows he’s more than capable in a fight, so Nicky tries to tell himself that he’s anxious from his conversation with Joe, and that he’s overplaying this moment in his head, and nothing’s going to happen.

He turns right instead of left at the end of the side street and heads towards the line of bright, loud bars where people are still drinking and chatting. Nicky walks into a crowd of people around his age and forces himself to focus, to breathe.

When the group of people passes by, he looks back over his shoulder and only sees the retreating collection of young people, illuminated perfectly by the streetlamps. 

Nicky shakes himself and walks home as quickly as he can, ignoring any flickering of paranoia, any buzzing at the back of his skull.

* * *

(August)

River pulls out all the stops to get him to focus on his dissertation at the end of summer, and even goes so far as to budget “Joe-time” so it doesn’t infringe on “Dissertation-time.”

“This schedule seems unfairly stacked,” Nicky points out, grumbling as he pokes at River’s planner. 

“Tell me that after November when you’re Dr. Genova and you can make out with your doctor boyfriend over your doctorate.”

“Say doctor one more time,” Nicky mumbles from his place on the mattress. 

It earns him a poke in the side, and he yelps indignantly. “Need a doctor?” River asks slyly as he’s rubbing his side with a scowl.

“Ugh.”

“You love me.”

“I really do.” Nicky gives her a smile, and River returns it in full force. Until he adds: “Only God knows why.”

* * *

At first, things are nervous between them after Nicky’s confession, but Nicky’s pretty sure it’s on him and not because of Joe. Joe is as sweet, wonderful, and attentive as ever, with his daily Good Morning texts and Good Night texts (he even sends them when they wake up and fall asleep in the same bed, which is something ridiculously romantic, and fuck, Nicky loves him so much).

Mostly, he’s nervous that somewhere in Joe’s mind he’s worried about Nicky’s temper. After all, Joe knows that Nicky stupidly jumped in to fight four guys at once last winter; now he knows that he beat the shit out of an older man a few years ago (deserved or not). He doesn’t want to know what Joe thinks of him and the darkness that lurks inside him -- but he also very much does want to know, if only so he can try and convince Joe that he’d never lift a hand to someone innocent, or to someone he loved.

(A stupid thing, Nicky tells himself when he can’t sleep at night, Violence is violence, and he’s so steeped in it, the childhood scuffles, the endless training on the sword in his father’s last-ditch attempt to curb his son’s energy, the alleyway fights, the all-consuming rage he feels in the face of injustice. Nicolo Genova might just be a violent person, and it would be ridiculous to think of himself as a knight for justice when he’s the first person to admit that he hates superheroes)

But, Joe still looks at him with love, and holds him with love, and touches him with love, and Nicky tries to give it back tenfold. He adores Joe, and shows him with every kiss, with every touch, with every moment he can.

The summer builds to a lazy crescendo as Joe and Nicky grow closer together, and Nicky lets himself think that they can have this forever, this golden-warm love that spills over into every boundary he’s set up, wiping out his anxieties and helping him to heal at long last from long-buried scars.

* * *

(September)

Classes have started again, and Nicolo spends more nights at his apartment, pushed by Nile to finish his paper on-time. Yusuf busies himself with his classes, works on art installations for a showing in Europe under a pseudonym, fields text messages from Andy about some growing concern of hers about social media something-or-other, and misses Booker.

Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen Booker or Andy in a few months; they’d disappeared together on some kind of mission that Andy had strangely said “this doesn’t concern you or the kid,” and then left them. 

After several centuries, Yusuf likes to think he knows his older sister’s tells: and she had been lying when she said it didn’t concern them. 

What she _meant_ was: “I don’t want to worry you.”

So, Yusuf goes through the wonderful life he’s built here, and tries not to worry about it, but all the same paranoia creeps in. People who stare at him for too long on the street for any reason cause him to add several extra blocks to his commute home. Anytime Nicolo reports a concern, Yusuf feels himself go on high alert, even if it’s something as silly as _I think the barista at Philz hates me now._

(He investigates the barista; it turns out he has a very large crush on Nicolo, and glaring is actually soft-gazing, but Nicolo clearly does not realize the effect he has on people with those horrible clothes of his and his floppy hair that falls over his ears so endearingly)

September blooms warm and soft under the skin, no hint of a boiling heat left over in the first week as a rush of cool air sweeps in from the northwest. Nicolo gets a date for his defense -- November -- and seems to be physically relieved by the idea of an end of his program. 

Yusuf glows with pride and kisses him a thousand times when he gets the date, proud of his Nicolo and how smart and hard-working he is, how wildly quickly he’ll be finishing his degree (“hey, I’m finishing in less than four years too,” Nile protests in private, and Yusuf kisses her head and reminds her that she had four PhDs, and this is Nicky’s first, so that’s why he seems more excited for Nicolo).

Nicolo and Yusuf grow closer together physically, Nicolo shy at first, a renewed nervousness from his confession about his past; if anything, it only made Yusuf love him more, how the man he loves can move so quickly to defend the defenseless, or to avenge those who cannot avenge themselves. He thinks of him as some grand knight, sword blazing and jaw set as he cuts down all those who would attempt to bring injustice to the world.

(Yusuf thinks Nicolo is very hot. He can be forgiven for ludicrous daydreams, because Nicolo is very, very hot, and it makes Yusuf’s attention slip constantly).

Yusuf knows he needs to tell Nicolo the truth; he’s beginning to believe that Nicolo won’t mind in the slightest. He’s unflappable, unwavering in his love, kind, and open-minded. This might not go well, Yusuf knows, but he doesn’t think it will go _poorly_ to the point where he’ll lose Nicolo.

That’s about the one thing he thinks he couldn’t recover from: losing Nicolo to this.

Nile agrees with him that it’s time, but she encourages him to wait until Nicky’s survived his defense. (“Don’t take away his focus from that,” she tells him, and Yusuf nods even as his stomach twists at another two months of omission, “let him have this time to prepare, and then tell him everything. Don’t rock his world right before he’s about to accomplish his dream.”)

In mid-September, they still have enough time that Yusuf gets to take Nicolo on a date that turns into fooling around in Nicolo’s apartment, giggling and touching and feeling things so deliciously and happily that he’s forgotten the anxiety of the past few weeks by the time he returns home.

Yusuf’s still smiling -- whistling even -- as he lets himself into his house. He grins wider when he sees the hoodie that Nicky left behind by accident two nights ago, and he thinks he’ll put it on for little, maybe sleep in it, surrounded by the scent of his lover. Almost as good as holding him. (Almost meaning _not at all but acceptable if he can’t hold him_ )

The back of his neck prickles as he takes off his shoes, and he stands up slowly, listening to the breath of the person standing in his kitchen. He looks over to her just as slowly, and swallows harshly when he sees the fear in her face, the blood on her shirt. Her go-bag is swung over her shoulder.

Next to her is Yusuf’s bag, his saif already in her hand.

“I hope that’s not yours,” he says as light heartedly as he can, gesturing to the bloodstain.

Andy stares at him, her eyes sad, almost pitying when she says, “It’s time, Joe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think the phrase is "shit's hitting the fan"
> 
> This was the chapter I was most anxious to write/post. I tried to handle everything as delicately as possible, and I hope the warnings came in handy if you needed it!! Obviously my relationship with the catholic church is ... strained at best, but I was raised Catholic, and many of the people I love are deeply Catholic, so please, please do NOT interpret what happened above as me saying I think Catholic = bad. But please full interpret it as me constantly raging at the harm that was done to all those poor children and young people and how it was swept under the rug; and in case you were wondering, this aspect of modern!Nicky's background was actually the FIRST detail of him that emerged in my mind when thinking about this fic, right down to I have outlined an entire fic where canon!Nicky finds out about the sex abuse scandal and pays visits to abusive priests while dressed as an IRL Crusader to ... you know, do a righteous fury Crusade in 2000.
> 
> If you want to scream, shout, let it all out, please do so below. I'd love to hear your theories for the final three chapters (!) of this fic. Know that the angst is only going to snowball from here, and next chapter is DEFINITELY THE WORST in terms of violence/angst, and I'm very very sorry already. Meep.
> 
> (Chapter ten, as far as I could outline, is ... going to be where the "angst + happy ending" promise comes in and I do hope to deliver to all of you awesome people who have stuck by this fic)


	8. Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Andy comes to him with grim news, Yusuf has to approach Nicolo with an upsetting conversation.
> 
> Weeks later, a disastrous revelation leads Yusuf to share the truth with Nicolo -- but it might just be too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO
> 
> This is it. The longest chapter in the damn thing (clocks in at under _11000 words_ , but it was that or split it into two and leave you with two mean cliffhangers in a row. Please PLEASE read the warnings for this, and if you really really hate me towards the end, please at least read all the way to the end if you can!
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Angst central.  
> Romantic breakup/friend breakup  
> Severe mental health situation (Depression --> Nicky's)  
> References to suicide (no one kills themselves or considers it, someone only asks if someone is trying to do that)  
> Self-caused harm (NOT regular self-harm, but a character does use a blade to cut their own skin, but NOT to cause pain to themselves)
> 
> SO, so much **violence**  
>  Bone breaking, gun violence, stabbings, Keane being a fucking asshole, etc.  
> Temporary character death (TOG fic after all) // execution style death  
> Frightening death scenes (VERY SIMILAR TO THE MOVIE)
> 
> [please read to the end??? don't hate me too much ???? let's do this together ???]

Here’s the thing:

Copley reviewed the footage over four dozen times before coming to the conclusion that he was not, in fact, batshit insane.

It was a regular smash-and-grab job, the sort of thing that mercenaries handled when sending in operatives just wouldn’t be a good decision for the agency. A suicide mission, truthfully, given to people who needed the money and seemed strangely unfazed by the very evident danger of the mission.

The leader of the group was some woman, South African judging by the accent (which, to be fair, she could have faked at the recorded meeting), and her group was composed of strangely good-looking soldiers: a tall, relatively silent Frenchman who had the complicated attractiveness most Hollywood actors would kill to have; a handsome North African man with kind eyes and a sweet smile that didn’t match the saif at his hip; and, a beautiful, young Black woman with an American accent and perfect aim. 

There was one forgotten surveillance camera at the site. Some shithole in South Sudan where kids had been taken, a shithole that American soldiers rarely walked back out of given how intensely the compound was guarded. Copley had not hired the group; but, he had been sent to collect evidence when the job went tits up. 

And from that lone camera, he had gathered invaluable evidence.

His superiors didn’t care much about the reality Copley discovered -- they only cared about the fact that over _one hundred and fifty_ of the militia responsible for the kidnapping had been found slaughtered, as though a highly trained battalion had swept through without a single casualty to the invading force. All they cared about was confirmation that another terrorist cell had not caused the carnage (and Copley _tried_ to point out that the girls had been found, safe and alive, at a UN refugee camp some fifty miles to the east, which was _not_ typical of a rival terrorist group), and whether any important information or weapons had been used or misplaced in the scuffle.

So, Copley went to the site (gagged at the smell), took photos, gathered the footage, came back, and holed himself up in a dark hotel room ten minutes from the hospital. He worked through the beginning and middle stages of his wife’s illness, searching for a distraction: and in the tapes, he found one.

The beautiful young girl -- Nile, he heard it first on the tape, her name was _Nile_ \-- had fallen first, a bullet to the neck when a teenager she’d discounted upon entering the compound shot her without hesitation.

That was all it took for the French fellow, Book or Booker according to later research, to absolutely lose his shit. Grenades were thrown, guns were fired, and a minute into the carnage, Copley stopped the tape because Booker bent down to check Nile’s throat, _and then she sat up._

The two exchanged words too quiet to hear on the shoddy footage, and then Booker handed the young woman another gun so they could proceed further into the compound after the woman, Andy, and the man, Joe. 

Bodies piled up faster than snowfall after that, and by the end of a twenty-one minute space of tape, the group had reconvened in the courtyard, only Joe missing.

The three spoke quietly, again out of earshot, mostly using hand signals -- and then Joe had come through the doors, two girls in his arms, and a trail of them walking behind him, their eyes closed, and their hands on each other’s shoulders. 

Not a single girl died in the crossfire (as they would discover later, twelve girls had died before the group’s arrival, in various, horrifying ways); and, not a single one of the group _stayed dead._

Because when Copley reviewed the tape over and over again, he counted at least one headshot (to Joe), fifteen torso shots (spread out) and too many shots to the legs and arms to count. 

They simply didn’t slow down. 

Right before they left, Andy looked up and saw the camera. Copley could see her mouth form a single syllable: _Fuck._ Then, she lifted her axe, which looked like it had been plucked from a history museum, and slammed it through the lens.

The footage from the camera had been stolen, no doubt by one of the group -- but the footage had been backed up to a central server that Copley found on his reconnaissance. 

It had been odd after that: he wrote _superpowers?_ and circled it half a dozen times before ripping the paper from his notebook and setting it on fire. He’d considered some kind of serum, body shield technology, even high tech magnetic fields that repelled bullets.

None of that explained how Nile had been shot in the neck (with blood and viscera included), only to jump back up a minute later with her hand in Booker’s. 

He briefly brought up the idea that their mercenaries were enhanced supersoldiers to his superior, but it was two days after his wife had taken a bad turn, so all he got was a sympathetic look and a pat on the shoulder.

As Copley sat there in the hospital, holding the hand of the woman he loved, watching her slip further and further away, too weak to breathe, his thoughts kept circling back to the impervious group, their skill and health and strength. Their bravery. Their untouchability.

Then, he went home alone, buried his wife, and sat in the dark for many weeks while loneliness and grief crushed him.

When he re-emerged after the new year, he felt a renewed sense of purpose; he did enough research and asked enough questions to attract the attention of one Stephen Merrick, and the rest …. Well …

The rest is on James Copley’s walls, inked-in and scratched-out, pinned together with yarn and rubber bands. Maps of activity, photos and artwork and accounts all painstakingly gathered after that job in South Sudan in 2015. 

Now, the year is 2018, and there’s a new immortal. Copley stares at grainy stills pulled from street-cameras in D.C., footage of a single man fighting off four larger guys at once, guys he left in the alleyway -- one with a broken jaw -- before he guided a shaking young woman out of harm’s way.

The girl dug up nothing of terrible interest: her name is Sammy, born in Georgia, currently living with an aunt in Maine. 

The fact that she had been so young (fifteen), homeless, and _not_ listed as a runaway by her parents tells Copley more than he can honestly _find_ in his search. But, the girl is unremarkable, and after a few weeks of brief contact and proximity to Nicolo Genova and Joe, she had left DC and headed north. 

Nicolo Genova though; on the board, the photos of him taking on that group of men are loosely connected to the photos of him coughing up water on the mossy shores of Northern Neck, newspaper clippings that briefly noted the passing of Sofia and Francesco Genova, a well-respected diplomat. Nicolo Genova can then be traced to seminary on the East Coast, and then to a parish in the district, and then …

Nothing. 

Whatever had happened to Nicolo inside its walls, the Catholic Church did an excellent job not letting a single detail slip. 

He had left the seminary in or before 2015, as he was not among the names of those ordained the appropriate year, and he didn't pop up again in the timeline until early 2017 when he published a paper coming out of Dupont University’s English department. 

As far as Copley can tell, the immortals die and then emerge from the first death impervious to actual mortality. Nicolo Genova does not look seventeen, which would have been the age he was when his parents drowned in ‘07, but he could easily be 25. And, Copley figures, some strange accident covered up by the Church could have killed him, and a sudden freakish resurrection could have been either a miracle or a hastily disproven PR nightmare.

Given how little Nicky has had to do with his church ever since, Copley can assume the authorities took the latter stance. 

By 2017, the immortals had found Nicky, and there are dozens of photos to prove that now they’re all aware of him. 

Nicky bumping into Booker outside the art department and the two of them chatting in the rain, last November.

Nicky and Andy visiting Joe on the same day.

Nicky and Nile, walking down the street, arm in arm, laughing at each other in restaurants and dining halls, studying in cubicles.

Nicky and Joe. Always Nicky and Joe, hand in hand, foreheads touching, kissing, embracing, and looking at each other with such naked adoration and affection that it makes the old wounds still healing in Copley’s chest ache to see.

(He misses his wife; at the core of it all, exhaustion from his job, obsession from this case, anxiety from Merrick breathing down his neck -- he misses her. He misses her. He--)

Copley has been meaning to approach Genova after Booker had flat-out refused to bring Nile to a meeting with Merrick. Copley isn’t sure what Merrick intends to _do_ with them once he has them -- at one point, he’d convinced himself it would be willing experiments, voluntary and safe and humane -- but he’s learned enough about the creepy Londoner to know that _nothing_ good will happen to these people inside his walls.

But, humanity needs this. And Copley doesn’t know shit about the lives of the rest of the immortal group -- Nile he knows slightly more about, knows she was born in the 60s, that she had a brother she loved but hadn’t seen in decades when he died abruptly early in the decade, and he even has baby pictures that he guiltily took from a family facebook page for deceased members of the Freeman family -- but he _does_ know about Nicky.

Nicky had been devout for quite some time. Nicky had been dedicated to service. Nicky is beloved by his classmates and professors given his soft-spoken manners and kind smile. Nicky had lost his parents horrifically, saved by some strange kismet by a woman who he would one day share a marvelous gift with.

Nicky is Copley’s best bet to bring immortality to Merrick, to reduce suffering, to end pain and death. Nicky has to be the key.

But, some time in the summer of 2018, he’s called out on a mission, the first time in the field in years. The agency wants him back off of his long sabbatical, wants him to help, to save lives, and some long-buried urge for heroism surges in his chest. He tells Merrick that the winter deadline might really be more doable, puts a pause on his personal surveillance of the DC group of immortals, and heads off.

He runs the operation from vans and safehouses, and it’s only two months in that he realizes that they’re all puppets on a string.

Booker and Andy are leading them on a wild goose chase, no doubt aware that he’s onto them. He’s half-amused, half-furious, and he disappears into an untraceable void, not popping back up until fall, when he heads right to London and brings the full, final details to Merrick.

If they want to play games with him, fine. Copley is done playing. 

It’s time to finish this.

* * *

“It’s time, Joe.”

Yusuf stares at Andy. “I’m not sure what you mean.” 

“We’ve been exposed, and we have to leave.” Andy kicks his bag a little and then sighs when he doesn’t move. “Now. Today. Before it gets worse.”

“Okay.” Yusuf nods and coughs. “I - Nicolo and Nile are defending their dissertations in a few weeks, and then I’m sure that--”

“No. Yusuf.” Andy walks forward and touches his arm. “ _We_ have to leave. Right now.”

Yusuf hears her this time. He knows what she means.

He’s burnt so many cell phones now, torched so many documents. He’s built up and discarded identities like a nervous magpie, over and over and over again has he destroyed himself and vanished into the world.

But now: now, he has his own little house with a nice bed with soft sheets that smell like Nicky if he twists his torso and buries his nose in them. Now, he has a favorite coffee place, and he knows Nicky’s order and he knows what Nicky’s smile looks like when he brings him a cappuccino when he’s just woken up, hair flipped up around his cowlick, eyes heavy with sleep. 

His phone has photos of Nicky on it, row after row of him smiling and laughing and reading. His art’s hanging in a gallery where no photos are allowed, _especially_ not of the artist when he shows up, but people can see it, and he knows people like it, and that feels strangely important for once.

He’s had November blocked out on his calendar for weeks, counting down the days until he can go and watch Nicky’s defense. He has a suit picked out. He bought Nicky a new tie for it because his only other tie has rubber ducks on it and _you can’t wear rubber duck ties to a thesis defense, Nico, you just can’t._

Yusuf’s started over dozens and dozens of times; he’d come here to play normal with Nile, both of them exhausted after that fuckery in ‘15, and they’d gotten normal. He’d had a normal job. A normal house. A normal phone. A normal closet, until you knocked out the false back wall and found his cache of weapons. His second story bathroom window leaks, for fuck’s sake. It’s _normal._

All of his life here, it’s normal, and now someone is after their family again because they aren’t normal; Yusuf’s been playing at a fantasy he can’t keep, dreams of a life that he can live in, that he can settle into. Strangely, Nicky’s words from that summer drift through his head:

_I don’t know if I’d appreciate life as much, knowing it wasn’t going anywhere. You’d be like a tree whose roots keep growing, but can’t put them down anywhere, so you’d have to find some other forest. Because people would see them otherwise._

Something collapses behind his breastbone, and he makes a punched-out, ugly sound. Andy grips his arm to keep him upright, and she doesn’t smile at him, but she doesn’t yell at him either as he cries. 

“I thought I had more time,” Yusuf whispers to the floor.

He could have had six, seven, maybe even ten more years here, if he’d been careful, if he’d worked at it -- no. he should have told Nicolo. No one understands complexity like Nicolo, no one mortal at least, and he would have _seen_ that Yusuf was telling the truth, he would have forgiven him. 

_He’d promised to forgive me._

And now he’d leave him.

(He isn’t sure Nicky can forgive him for that)

“Nile?” Yusuf asks weakly, not capable of more words than that.

“She’s upset too.” Andy sighs. “Not as much as you, obviously, but … you know how important your … Nicky is to her. But, the less he knows about us the better. He’s safer that way.”

Yusuf doesn’t know what to say; but, he does grab on to one word. 

_Safer?_

“It seems that someone approached Booker a number of months ago and asked him to take part in a series of experiments.” 

_What?_

“He … didn’t tell us right away, but he didn’t want any of us to get involved. You know how he is.” Yusuf’s brain is spinning too much to piece together how _Booker is,_ and how that factors into what Andy’s telling him. “But we’ve been looking into it ourselves for the past few months and -- it’s a real threat, Joe. We have to go undercover. Deeper than we have in decades.”

Yusuf knows he is weeping fully because Andy reaches out and tucks away the tears for him with strong, capable hands. Her voice is unfairly steady as she continues to speak.

“When we leave, I can destroy your phone, erase your information,” Andy offers gently. “I’ll make the calls. It can be a clean break.” 

It won’t be.

“I can’t leave him,” Yusuf whispers, muscles locked in. “I-”

She opens her mouth, and for a sick moment, he thinks she might say _I tried to tell you._

She says something worse.

“I’m so sorry, Yusuf.”

* * *

There’s a knock at the door.

Nicky looks up from his book and frowns, squinting a little as his eyes adjust to the darkness of his apartment from his small reading lamp. He stands and stretches a little, rubbing his neck as he walks to the door.

It could be River, but she’d sent him a long text earlier about how she had to leave town for a while, and from the sound of it, she’d already left.

He hums as he peers through the hole to see who’s on the other side; he grins immediately and throws the door open.

“Don’t tell me you forgot something,” Nicky says, hoping Joe will do the same thing he did _last_ time he showed up unannounced an hour after a date -- that is, kiss Nicky silly and say _that’s what I forgot._

Joe doesn’t do that.

Joe’s eyes are red, and his hands are shaking. At once, Nicky knows something terrible has happened.

There’s a rucksack over his shoulder, and some kind of alarm bell screams in Nicky’s head; when he takes Joe’s hand to pull him inside, he finds his fingers are cold and clammy for the first time in memory.

“Joe?” He speaks quietly but when that doesn’t get a response, he says it a little louder. “Joe. What’s wrong?”

Joe looks at him, and his mouth screws up before he looks away.

It’s always Nicky who can’t maintain eye contact. Not Joe. Not wonderful, confident Joe.

Something terrible definitely happened.

“What’s--”

“I have to go.” 

Nicky stops in the middle of his question and stares at him instead. “You have to go? Go where?”

Joe shakes his head and shoves his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, the one Nicky loves so much, the one that stretches so beautifully across Joe’s shoulders. 

“My family needs me.”

“Oh.” Nicky nods, slowly, understanding. “Are they okay?”

Joe jerks his head noncommittally, and Nicky figures that means something like _obviously not, or I wouldn’t look like this right now._

“Joe.” Nicky touches his arm, and somehow that makes Joe shake worse. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay--”

“I can’t come back,” Joe croaks out, and Nicky’s heart skips a painful beat before plummeting into his gut.

“What?”

(He fell asleep, he thinks suddenly. Nicky fell asleep and this is some strange anxiety dream. His teeth might fall out soon, or perhaps Joe will ask him to go on stage and act out lines in a play he’s never seen before)

“When I go, I’m -- I’m not coming back.” Joe clears his throat and looks up at Nicky, something stiff sliding into place. “I’m sorry, Nicky.”

It’s the first time Joe’s ever called him Nicky. It sounds wrong in his voice.

“Why?” Nicky shakes his head and grabs Joe’s arm when the man doesn’t answer. “Joe, you’re scaring me.” Regret flashes behind Joe’s eyes, but it doesn’t inspire much honesty from him.

“I wish I could tell you more, but -- but I can’t come back. You won’t ever see me again.”

Someone’s taken a baseball bat to Nicky’s heart, which is really unfair considering it’s already twitching in his abdomen somewhere. It’ll die on its own, he wants to tell the baseball bat. Just leave it there. Just give it some time.

“Is this about … documentation?” Nicky guesses anxiously. Joe’s never given any indication that there’s an issue with his documents, but if he looks this stressed, and if he’s evading questions … “I mean, I don’t have any money, not anymore, but - but my parents had friends in the State Department. Please, let me call them for you, we can--”

“Documents.” Joe barks out a cold, unkind laugh, and Nicky’s blood freezes. “You think -- fucking documents can’t fix this.”

“Fix what?” Nicky asks in a whisper.

They’d been kissing two hours ago. Right here, in the bed behind them. It had been so warm then, and the lights were on, the sun still up as their legs slotted together and Joe left purpling-pink bruises along Nicky’s collarbone while they laughed so sweetly.

He’d left love-bites of his own on Joe. Oddly enough, he can’t see them anymore. 

He tries not to think of the metaphor there.

“Fix what --” Joe cuts himself and shakes his head. “No. No, the less you know the better.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Nicky guesses. He knows enough about organized crime from his father’s job; Joe’s told him stories about strange art deals that had gone sideways, and again, it wouldn’t be out of the question for something terrible to happen. “Joe, please, just tell me, nothing you can say will make me want to leave you.”

Joe laughs again, but it sounds like the exhalation of a dying man; he tilts his head back and stares at the hideous stucco ceiling above them. Nicky pulls his hand away slowly, a strange whiplash building in his chest as he realizes Joe doesn’t actually want him to touch him.

Still staring at the ceiling, Joe says, in a disconnected voice, “It’s not like that, Nicky. I’m the one leaving you.”

“Joe?”

“It was going to happen at some point,” Joe continues, quieter now as though it’s not for Nicky’s benefit. “I --”

He looks at Nicky for a long moment. “I’m so sorry.”

For some reason, these are the first words that have sounded fully genuine since Joe got here. Nicky tries to tell himself it’s not just because these are the first words that suggest a remorse for how thoroughly Joe’s ripping his heart out.

“I thought--” Nicky begins weakly but he stops himself.

He won’t be so pathetic to say _I thought we were in love._

Even if, only hours ago, Joe was raining kisses on his face, telling him in half a dozen languages that he loved him.

Nicky stares at the floor, feeling cold and empty and a thousand miles away. He thinks of water closing in over his head. He thinks of blood on his hands. He thinks of the detached expression on Joe’s face. 

When he looks back up, he matches Joe’s expression, even as tears burn in the back of his throat.

“Okay,” he says hoarsely. He nods, once. “Okay.”

Joe stares at him for a long moment. It’s like there’s a poem in his eyes, something screaming out to him, begging him for interpretation, for translation.

It’s in a language that Nicky can’t speak. 

So he looks away.

And Joe does too.

“Nicolo.” He says his name like he always has, with an unfair level of wonder and appreciation and something like love if Nicky squints. “Nicolo, I --”

“Will I ever hear from you again?” Nicky asks, already knowing the answer. “Will we speak?”

There’s a long pause, and Joe isn’t looking at him when he answers. “No. I don’t think so.”

Joe takes a step towards him, hand extended. “I -- I’d want to -- but Nicolo, it’s for the best, and--”

“Don’t tell me it’s for the best,” Nicky says without any kind of warmth. “Don’t -- don’t stand there and destroy me and tell me it’s for the best. You’re better than that, Joe.”

Joe’s hand falters and falls back to his side.

Nicky takes a shuddering breath and adds, “I don’t think I know anything about you, but I know you’re better than that.”

Joe had the audacity to let a tear slip down his beautiful, perfect check. It vanishes in his beard, which Nicky will never feel on his skin again. 

“You know me better than anyone, Nicolo.”

Nicky turns and stares at his bed. “How sad for you then. Because I think I know a ghost.”

There’s a sharp inhale, but Nicky doesn’t turn around. He closes his eyes and fights the burning in the back of his throat. He has stared in the face of death. He has been spat back out by the sea. He has faced the destruction of his soul over and over again.

He will not fall to his knees for this man, no matter how badly it hurts.

“Nicolo.” A plea. How odd. “Nicolo, you have to understand--”

There’s the faint buzzing of a phone call; Nicky can see his phone charging by the bed, so he knows it’s not his phone. Joe pauses, and a moment later he says, “I really have to go now.”

“Okay.”

There’s a numbness settling over him, making his limbs heavy and eyes sore. He wants Joe to leave (he never wants Joe to leave). He wants Joe to stop talking so he can just go to bed (he never wants Joe to stop talking, he doesn’t want this bed if Joe’s not in it).

“Goodbye, Nicolo.”

Nicky’s still staring at his comforter, lost in the grey scratchiness of it, when he hears the door click shut.

He collapses faster than a paper doll. He doesn’t even make it to the bed.

Nicolo Genova cries and cries, and he can’t seem to breathe, and he’s going to drown all over again on dry land.

And it’s all Joseph Jones’s fault.

* * *

_I really need to talk to you,_ he texts River in the morning after he wakes up with a sore neck and a throbbing chest. _Please. I know you’re going through a lot, but Joe broke up with me, and I think he’s just gone._

Six hours later, he texts her again. _I’m so scared._

His thoughts are darker than he can remember since his last day as a deacon; he can’t seem to tread the water closing in around him. Nicky can feel himself about to sink, and he doesn’t know how to find the strength to keep kicking. 

_River?_

* * *

River never responds.

Another person who has no problem leaving Nicolo Genova behind.

* * *

Nicolo Genova gets up. He goes to his cubicle. He finishes his dissertation. 

His advisor reviews it, gives some commentary as usual, and Nicolo nods woodenly and makes the changes with no fight.

His advisor stares at him. Offers him a card for mental health services, tells him that it’s not unusual for the end of a rigorous, exhausting program to take its toll on the mind, the spirit.

It’s the kindest thing that Dr. Andrews has probably ever said to a student; Nicolo takes the card with a smile more plastic than the chair he’s sitting on. He throws it away on the first floor and then walks home through the rain in a sodden t-shirt and fraying jeans.

He barely leaves his apartment, and lives off of the dried goods collection he’s been hoarding all year while someone else had been helping him cook meals so they could feed each other little bites and laugh, while someone else had been tempting him outside to eat hot food in the dining hall as her treat. 

There’s an endless supply of canned meat and fruit and vegetables, and honestly most days Nicolo Genova doesn’t want to eat much of anything at all. 

Some part of himself questions how he’s fallen apart so quickly. He’s lost so many people, after all. What’s a boyfriend? A best friend? In the grand scheme of things, Nicolo Genova has lost staggeringly more.

But it feels so much worse suddenly.

So, he stays inside and doesn’t answer the door when people knock, and doesn’t answer his phone when unfamiliar numbers call, or familiar numbers either unless it's his advisor or his landlord. He reads dozens of papers, flips through books, and writes a little more.

In the weeks after Joseph Jones and the weeks before his defense, Nicolo Genova simply exists.

God knows it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

* * *

They find Copley’s safehouse in November.

Yusuf tries not to think about how it’s the day before Nicolo’s defense. He tries not to think about a lot of things these days.

If it weren’t for Andy loudly demanding he get up, if it weren’t for Booker offering him a staunch shoulder to lean on, if it weren’t for Nile’s own grief and sympathy for having lost Nicolo, Yusuf isn’t sure he would have moved at all in the weeks before their discovery. 

(He hadn’t moved at all when they first arrived to their Virginia safehouse; Andy’s plan was to stay a little longer in the area, learn more about Copley and this Merrick who was funding him -- thankfully not the CIA, but also worryingly not the CIA -- and Yusuf had taken advantage of the private room in the backwater safehouse, a sprawling farm that had been abandoned since 1780. 

He had laid in bed for days before drawing, and drawing, and drawing. Any poem he wrote was about sea-glass eyes and strong hands and sloping noses. Yusuf thinks he could spend the next century like this, if he could only get over the temptation to simply watch Nicolo grow old from afar, watch him fall in love with someone else, watch him grow grey and old and perfect, completing his story the way he wants to. The way he deserves.

Yusuf al-Kaysani will love Nicolo Genova until oblivion at last takes him, and he wonders if Allah will give them any kind of paradise where they can be together -- thousands of years lie ahead of him until he has any chance of knowing, and he’ll spend every single one of them loving the man he’d left behind, the man whose heart he had shattered in the midst of shattering his own)

Copley is not there when they arrive at his safehouse. It makes sense -- Booker and Andy had been very busy abroad, shaking loose ends and rattling things to draw Copley’s attention. Merrick had been easier to distract in a way: give Booker sixteen hours and a solid computer and he can make anyone’s stock prices seem intensely threatened.

But, there’s no room for distraction now; now, it’s time to see everything he has on them, and to take away any primary documentation that they can.

When they find his boards, they all still.

“Well. That’s creepy as shit,” Nile observes, hand still properly on her gun, military through and through.

“You can say that again.” Booker taps a photo of him from 1995. “This is a horrible angle for me.”

“All your angles are horrible,” Nile mutters, jabbing at him with a sharp elbow. 

Booker drops his head and laughs, a little shrug of his shoulders that would be wildly endearing to Yusuf if he felt anything through the haze of grief around his heart.

Andy barely throws them a smirk, too alert to really let any kind of amusement through. Yusuf grabs a handful of non-photocopied handwriting samples from the table and stuffs them in a bag; he freezes when he hears Andy call his name, fear in her voice

“Joe.”

“What is it, boss?” He rubs his neck blearily and crosses the room to the final board (how many boards does one obsessive person need, he wonders angrily). 

What he sees there freezes his blood in his veins; Nile sees it too and gasps in shock.

“Merde,” Booker mutters.

It captures the sentiment quite well.

There’s dozens of photographs of Nicolo.

The post-it notes are covered in his name: _Nicky, March 2018; Nicky with Nile on campus, late 2017; Nicky with Booker, November 2017; Nicky and Joe, December 6, 2017; Nicky and Joe, January 10, 2018; Nicky and Joe, January 15, 2018,_ and on and on and on --

Nicky holding coffee. Nicky laughing at a joke from Nile. Nicky passing out papers to his freshman class last year. Terrifyingly, photos of Nicky stepping out of Yusuf’s house in various states of exhaustion and undress depending on the time of day and occasion. 

Medical records. Newspaper clippings. Paperwork from the university. Papers he’s published.

 _Drowned?_ Circled a half-dozen times on a pinned piece of paper next to a newspaper article about his parents’ death. 

_Accident?_ Underlined repeatedly, next to a print-out of a Mass announcement for his first service as a temporary deacon.

 _Key to Nile and Joe,_ stapled to a photo of the three of them outside the restaurant where he’d wiped out last winter, Nicolo looking dazed, Nile and Yusuf looking terrified and arguing over his semi-conscious body.

There’s an entire wall of Nicolo Genova staring down at them, and Yusuf can’t breathe.

“Holy fuck,” Nile whispers, staring up at the wall in horror. “Oh my God, what the fuck-”

“You can say that again,” Andy mutters. 

She grabs a piece of paper from the board directly in front of her and shakes her head. “Copley thinks Nicky’s immortal.”

“No--” Booker shakes his head. “That’s idiotic, the boy’s constantly hurting himself--”

“Isn’t that part of the problem?” Andy points out humorlessly. “He’s a disaster magnet, and he’s walking around with a --”

“Target on his back,” Nile finishes, eyes wide. “Joe, this means--”

“He’s alone,” Yusuf whispers, eyes trapped as he gazes on a photo of Nicolo smiling at him in a park, a blissful summer day where Nicolo had confessed his disinterest in living forever and plunged an ice-cold blade into his heart by accident.

“We left him all alone back there.”

* * *

Nicolo Genova is very tired.

He lays out his suit for his defense three days ahead of time. He tries to eat food just so he won’t faint in front of the committee. He debates inviting another TA to be in the room with him, but then remembers that his best friend and his boyfriend were supposed to be there, and the thought of inviting anyone tastes sour in his mouth.

He doesn’t barter with God. He doesn’t envision little arguments with his brain.

He wakes up. He stays in bed. He checks his paper. He washes his face and brushes his teeth at least once a day. He stares at the suit Joe had picked out for him. Considers throwing the tie out the window. Decides he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t expect much out of his days before the defense.

What he doesn’t expect is a sudden phone call from an unexpected number. That itself isn’t odd, actually. What’s odd is that the number calls three dozen times in a row before it starts to leave text messages.

Nicky groans and lifts his head from his pillow, where he’s been watching Parks and Rec _again_ on his laptop, the dialogue slipping through his ears like little wisps of smoke.

[ _Unknown caller_ ]: Nicolo. Please pick up the phone.

[ _Unknown caller_ ]: Nicolo it’s Joe please pick up.

[ _Unknown caller_ ]: Please, I need to speak with you.

“I thought you were never going to speak to me again,” Nicky mutters uncharitably. 

He’s allowed to lack charity. He wants to cry, honestly, at the thought of talking to Joe. He doesn’t want to talk to Joe. He wants nothing more than to talk to him. He wants Joe to hold him.

He wants answers.

That’s why he picks up the next time the phone buzzes.

“Hello?” He snaps into the phone. 

“Nicolo.” Joe sounds painfully relieved; Nicky can hear honking on the other end, and wonders where Joe’s driving. “Nicolo, I need to see you.”

“I thought that was impossible,” Nicky mutters, picking at a scab on his thumb, where he’d jammed it into a staple by accident last week. “Thought you didn’t want to-”

“Fuck. Nicolo, listen to me!” Joe snarls, and Nicky stiffens and sits upright.

Joe sounds terrified.

“Nicolo, you need to come to my old studio, immediately. Now. If you’re at your apartment, they might not know where you are, and I don’t want to have any chance of other people -- just, fuck, please, please come now--”

“Your studio?” Nicky’s feet hit the floor and the world feels a little dizzy. The buzzing in his ears has come back. “The one near campus?”

“Yes. Now, please, it will be faster than me trying to get to your street, fucking one-ways--”

“Alright.” Nicky doesn’t know why he isn’t questioning this, but he grabs his shoes and slips them on, still on the phone. “I’ll -- I’ll see you soon?”

“I love you,” Joe answers, still pained, and he hangs up before Nicky can process that.

“Oh, fuck you,” Nicky snaps, stuffing his phone in his pocket.

He ruffles his fingers through his hair, relieved that he’d washed it earlier that day; easier than getting up before his 8 AM defense to do that. 

It’s warm today, a weird late fall warmth that only DC can manage, so he doesn’t grab a jacket or sweater, only checks his phone and wallet before locking his door behind him and jogging down the steps.

There’s spots in his vision, a combination of limited activity and calories from the last few weeks, and Nicky takes a deep breath before plunging outside, the sun already set and a light chill setting in.

He feels like he’s vibrating out of his skin, but that terrible numbness that’s swallowed him whole for the last five weeks overpowers it, helping his legs pump as he runs through campus towards the art studio Joe had been using at the far end of a renovated warehouse, tucked away from main roads and residences.

No one’s there, and he fumbles with his keys for the padlock to Joe’s station near the front. It’s an eerie kind of quiet, and he wonders, treacherously, if Joe’s brought him here for some awful reason.

He hates himself for the thought; he doesn’t hate Joe. Joe would never hurt him, beyond crumpling his heart like used tissue and throwing it into a trash incinerator. No. Joe wouldn’t hurt him like that.

It’s just paranoia setting in, with how dark it is, and how it constantly feels like he’s being watched. Just his anxiety. As usual.

He’s only alone for a minute before he hears someone running through the front door, and the shape in the darkness quickly turns into Joe.

“Nicolo,” he breathes out.

Nicky can only stare at him before looking away. He glances around Joe’s studio and sees more than one painting of himself. There are other paintings, wrapped and stacked neatly with shipping labels already stamped on them, open boxes with packing material. He wonders which TA and/or fan of Dr. Jones had been sent here to pack up the remnants of his life; Joe’s house on Church Street has been empty for weeks now.

“Nicolo, we need to leave.”

Nicky freezes at that and stares at Joe with withering incredulity. “What?”

“Right now.” Joe holds out a hand. “Please. You’re not safe here.”

“In your studio?” Nicky asks blankly. He’s so fucking tired. And he doesn’t want to be here suddenly. “No, you know what?” He holds his hands up. “I’m done with bullshit games. I’m - I’m leaving, Joe, and please lose my number--”

Joe steps in his path, his eyes wild with fear and grief and something larger than Nicky can name. “Leave now, with me. Please.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, Joseph Jones--”

“Nicky, we can protect you --”

“What are you talking about?” Nicky blinks, thoroughly lost. “Who’s _we_? What kind of shit are you into, Joe?”

“They think you’re one of us, Nicky —“

“Is this … like a gang thing?” He frowns, and Joe laughs a little, a little hysterically, eyeing the exit before looking at him.

“No. No, I can explain _everything_ to you on the way, but we need to go right now, please--”

“No.” Nicky shakes his head and crosses his arms. “Fuck you, I’m not leaving.”

“You can be angry at me now, later, forever, but we need to go!”

“I can’t reschedule my thesis defense, Joe. It’s in twelve fucking hours. I —“

“Please don’t go.” It’s only the tears in Joe’s voice that stop Nicky from snapping at him more. “They think you died.”

That doesn’t make any sort of goddamn sense. 

“And that you’re one of us—”

“Again, I have to say that I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“Has there been anyone in the last few months who spoke to you or approached you and acted oddly? Any strange phonecalls?”

This gives Nicky pause. Joe relaxes a little when all he does is stare at him, but then Nicky remembers, and manages to answer. “Yes. He … he said his name was James, and he had a job opportunity for me if I would go with him.” 

Joe hisses and drags his hands though his hair. Nicky’s quick to explain that, “I didn’t call him back and I blocked his number, but his voicemail alone was weird because who offers a job to an English PhD in _this_ economy?”

Joe does not laugh at his joke. Nicky doesn’t even laugh at his own joke. Instead, Joe says, “I wanted to explain this to you a thousand times.” He crosses the cramped studio and tugs a painting out from behind a larger stack of canvas. 

He unwraps it slowly, revealing an oil painting in the style of the Renaissance. “I wanted to -- I wanted to do it gently. Give you time to ask me questions.” Joe shakes his head and looks up at Nicky. “We are out of time. So I will explain it to you quickly, and then we can leave, and you can hate me all you want after you are safe--”

“What?” Nicky’s dumbfounded, and Joe pulls the painting all the way free.

The painting looks remarkably like his friend, Andy. The woman who saved his life. His angel from the water.

“Is that…” Nicky blinks and frowns. “I don’t know how a painting of your friend proves--”

“This painting is from 1535,” Joe explains tiredly. He wilts when Nicky stares at him. “Andy thought it would be nice if I painted her dressed as a man after an admirer commissioned a portrait of her. Her wife thought it was lovely, and we’ve kept it ever since.”

“Wife--” Nicky puts this together slowly and then takes a step back. “1535?” He laughs nervously and eyes the exit. “Joe, that sounds absolutely fucking--”

“I know.” Joe grabs a knife from the table, a knife used to cut twine and the like, and Nicky yelps, jumping back more, hands going in front of him. 

It seems like that motion hurts Joe worse than anything else, and he shakes his head, tears apparent in his eyes. “No, Nicolo, I’d never --”

Nicolo’s trying to judge how fast he can run to the exit, if he can outrun Joe if he has to, when Joe raises the blade and brings it down on his own forearm.

“What the fuck?” He shouts in Italian, hand flying to his mouth.

 _Fucking hell_ \-- but Joe doesn’t raise the blade again. 

Nicky crosses the room quickly and grabs Joe’s arm. “What the hell are you doing?” He half-asks, half-sobs, “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“No.” Joe laughs bitterly. “I cannot kill myself, Nicolo, look--”

He holds his forearm up, dragging Nicky’s hand with him. Blood drips down Joe’s arm, but …

But there’s no cut.

“A magic trick?” Nicky spits, letting go of Joe again. “You’re a sick fuck, Joe, what the fuck are you trying to do--”

Joe sighs and cuts his thumb open this time, ignoring Nicky’s shout of protest. With limited effort, Nicky wrests the blade from Joe’s grip, flips it shut and stuffs it in his pocket. 

“Watch,” Joe demands, holding his thumb in front of Nicky’s nose.

The cut is horrid, oozing with blood.

And then it is not.

The bleeding stops. The skin folds together. It becomes pink, then white, then nothing. No scar.

Nicky stares in shock at the unblemished skin and the blood that seems to have come from nowhere.

“I’m going to call 911,” he decides, feeling like he’s watching this from a thousand feet above them. “You -- you’re a danger to yourself, you’re acting erratic--”

“Nicolo, you saw with your own two eyes--”

“I don’t know what I saw.”

“Give me the knife back, and I’ll show you again. You can touch it this time, see how it heals, you’ll see it is no trick--”

Nicky laughs bitterly again and takes another step back. “I’m not Thomas.”

Joe clearly doesn’t quite get the joke. 

“And I clearly have no idea who the fuck you are,” Nicky whispers, shaking his head in something that feels like grief.

“That’s fair.” Joe smiles at him weakly. “And I can tell you more, I can explain everything to you, after we leave -- but I can tell you this. Look at me so you know I’m telling the truth.”

He doesn’t continue until Nicky does exactly that. He looks him in the eyes and tries not to flinch because these are the eyes that have haunted his dreams for five weeks. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t run for the exit; he doesn’t know why he hasn’t pushed him away and cursed him out more.

Something tells him to listen, and the buzzing in his ears fades slightly when Joe says:

“My real name is Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysani, and I was born in 1066.”

* * *

“Well, I guess the year was 458 to me,” Yusuf jokes weakly.

Nicky only stares at him. Staring is better than shouting, he supposes. He can work with staring.

His beloved’s lips barely move when he asks, “Are you -- are you mocking me?”

What’s left of Yusuf’s heart crumbles into dust. “Of course not, habibi. I love -- I don’t want to lie to you. This is the truth.”

“You’re either lying now, or you’ve been lying for a year,” Nicolo whispers. “You -- I don’t --”

“I love you as I have never loved another in 950 years,” Yusuf says earnestly, reaching out to Nicolo. Nicolo, for the first time in memory, does not reach back. “My soul knows yours, Nicolo. You have been an answer to every question I have ever asked, and I knew you would be the most important mortal I’ve met when you walked into my office with _my_ poem."

“Your —

“I’m al-Kaysani.” Yusuf laughs and it’s brittle but not cruel. He doesn’t want to be cruel to his beloved any longer. 

Instead, he gestures at the art gathered around him. “This is only some of the work I have accumulated over the centuries. I have entire warehouses the size of this one around the world, with art I’ve painted, art I’ve collected. Thousands of poems, sitting in storage.”

He shakes his head weakly, “and I’d never seen anything that made me understand what I was writing about or who I was painting for until I met you.”

Yusuf holds his hand out. This time, Nicolo takes it, frustration on his face, but building comprehension too.

“You -- this is real?” Nicolo asks, still staring into his eyes. Searching for the truth. This time, Yusuf makes damn sure he can see it. “You -- you’re immortal.”

Yusuf nods, and then Nicolo closes his eyes and huffs a laugh. “That actually -- a lot of things sort of make sense now. But -- am I dreaming?”

“No.” Yusuf touches Nicolo’s lovely face and shakes his head. “No, but I thought the same thing when you walked into my office. I thought I had wandered into a dream.”

Nicolo gives him a barely there smile, but it’s the first he’s received since coming here, so Yusuf will not question it or weigh it against the free and lovely smiles of their past. 

“We need to go,” Yusuf repeats, squeezing Nicolo’s hand. “There are powerful people after me, and they think … they think you are also immortal. I am so sorry, Nicolo, I did not want to ruin your life--”

Nicolo splutters at this. “Me? I’m not … no one could think …”

Yusuf tsks and releases Nicolo in favor of grabbing an abandoned journal off the floor. “When money is involved, people are willing to think almost anything. And the men following me, following my family -- they will stop at nothing until we’re trapped in a cage to poke and prod.”

Nicolo’s eyes shift downwards as he straightens back up, and his eyes widen. “Is that a gun?”

If this were a different situation, Yusuf might tease _yes, but I am_ also _happy to see you,_ but adrenaline is continuing to surge in his veins, and Nile will be back with the car full of Nicky’s things at any moment. Getting Nicolo here was partly to convince him using the things in this room (but his brave, kind, trusting Nicolo had listened much faster than Yusuf could have hoped), and partly to give Booker and Nile time to grab things without Nicolo protesting too much.

“Yes,” he says simply. “In case they show up.”

“They?”

“People who work for a corporation that wants to test us.” Yusuf shudders and taps his hand on an empty easel. “That’s our worst fear, to be trapped. To be imprisoned. We cannot die, or at least we rarely do, but trust me Nicolo, there are worse things than death.”

“I’m sorry.” Nicolo shakes his head and closes his eyes, his hands going to his temple. “I’m so sorry, I just -- you vanished, Joe, and now you’re back, and you’re -- you’re saying all this stuff and I want to believe you, and my own eyes tell me I should believe you, and -- and I think my gut, too--”

 _That’s good,_ Yusuf thinks as Nicolo continues on, _that’s good. Something in him already believes me. Wants to believe me. He feels it too, how connected we are._

“--but it’s so much, Joe. It’s … my head hurts, and I still don’t believe I’m awake, and … and I’m scared.” Nicolo laughs a little, his shoulders shrugging with it. “I don’t understand.”

“I know,” Yusuf says gently.

His ears prick suddenly at the sound of a car engine turning off; it’s odd that Nile and Booker wouldn’t just let the engine idle. He tunes back into Nicolo:

“I -- I need time.”

 _We don’t have time,_ is what Yusuf would say.

It’s what he would say if there wasn’t a sudden flash-bang of noise and smoke and terror, gas burst from a grenade tossed to the center of the warehouse from the propped open exit door.

All hell breaks loose.

Yusuf’s lungs fill with the gas as he’s closest to the source, and he goes down coughing. Through the pandemonium, he can hear Nicolo coughing as well. 

Yusuf groans and staggers to his feet, still hunched over and coughing, and he struggles to pull his gun, but red lasers dart through the smoke and land on his abdomen. He snorts and rolls his eyes.

Until he sees the same dots on Nicolo’s chest, the younger man wheezing for breath at the table, hunched over but still on his feet somehow.

“Nicolo,” Yusuf coughs. “Nicolo, hide. Run, please--”

“Gentlemen!”

A huge man emerges from the smoke, gas mask in place. It’s dissipated enough that he takes it off at the entrance to Yusuf’s work space, and he stares down at them with a smirk. Four men flank him, and Yusuf calculates the odds.

He’s done worse. Gotten through worse. He just didn’t have a very fragile, very breakable man with him that he also needed to get out.

“I’m guessing Merrick sent you?” Yusuf asks as calmly as he can while he’s coughing miserably. “Funny. You don’t look like a scientist.”

“Merrick?” Nicolo mutters. “Like -- like the pharma guy?”

Yusuf locks eyes with him and nods. He wants to stand next to him when this happens, he wants them to be taken together peacefully. He takes a step towards Nicolo, and is met with five distinct sounds of guns cocking.

“Shit,” he mutters, glancing at the group of men behind the leader. He holds his hands in the air, thumb off his trigger. “This doesn’t have to end in violence.”

“Are you asking or telling?” The leader mocks. “Because it doesn’t matter if we bring you in alive or dead, does it?”

“Nicolo,” Yusuf murmurs, as Nicolo continues to cough. “Nicolo, duck behind the table, in three seconds, okay?”

To the leader, he says: “You sound very confident for a man who can die.”

As the man begins to retort, Yusuf drops his gun down to his chest, and shoots four times, taking out the men at the back. He does this to see how fast their reaction time is; he does this to see if there are shouts from the back of the warehouse.

No.

He’s struck by three different bullets, but he doesn’t stop, even as one rips through his ribcage. He shoots the back-up and falls to his knees, groaning, as Nicolo sobs his name from where he’s crouched behind the table.

“It’s okay,” he whispers to Nicolo as he drops his gun and holds his hands up. The world turns black around him. “Just don’t -- don’t move, don’t fight --”

“We surrender,” he tells the large man who sweeps towards him, rifle primed and locked on him. Yusuf sways where he kneels, one hand dropping to the dusty floor as he wheezes, the bullet taking a while to work out from the muscles of his stomach. “Don’t -- don’t hurt him, we’ll go quietly--”

“Fuckin’ shoot four men, four good men, and say you’re going quietly?” The gun comes down across his cheekbone and he knows it’s a break. He spits out blood and wishes he wasn’t spitting out blood so he can tell Nicolo he’s alright.

Zipties are procured and loop around his wrists awfully, tugging him this way and that until he’s hauled sideways and dumped on the floor. He’s also shot through the thigh, and Nicolo shouts in anger.

“You want one too?” The man demands, and Yusuf looks over at Nicolo, his eyes streaming from the leftover smoke and the pain ricocheting through his body, and his fear for them both, and he sees Nicolo staring at him with a strange steadiness.

“It’s alright,” he mouths to Nicolo in Italian. “Tesoro, it’s going to be okay.”

There’s no reason for Merrick to hold or hurt Nicolo. He has to believe that. He has to believe that Nicolo will be given some sort of NDA, or Andy and Nile and Booker will find them soon and get them out before anyone can realize how Nicolo doesn’t fit their requirements, and --

The man grabs Nicolo by the collar and drags him out to the middle of the studio. Nicolo stumbles, his hands crammed in his pockets like he always does when he’s anxious.

“Hands,” he snaps, holding out his own hand and a ziptie impatiently, the rifle looser than before. 

Nicolo has been so quiet this whole time, other than his shouts of protest. With his wide eyes and nervous expression, with his pretty face and the thinness of his waist, Nicolo seems so fragile. So small. Like a little mouse.

Nicolo pulls his hands from his pockets, and stabs the man in the side brutally.

The guy falls with a snarl, and Nicolo kicks him in the chest, the knife he’d taken from Yusuf only minutes ago (minutes ago, a lifetime ago), gripped in his hand.

“Joe, get up!” Nicolo shouts desperately, running to him. He tosses the knife in his hand towards Yusuf and it slides across the floor to him. “Run, Joe, come on--”

The leader staggers to his feet as Nicolo succeeds in pulling him up. Yusuf is healing slower than normal, his leg still healing from the fracture from the bullet, bone shards snapping into place as he groans and heaves upright.

“Joe, come on,” Nicolo begs.

Then they’re both bowled sideways by the other man.

“I’m going to have to put you both down for this, huh?” He snarls, slapping Nicolo in the face with the butt of the rifle.

Nicolo twists and falls to the floor, and Yusuf stumbles forward, hands bound, a shout on his lips. He gets another bullet in the side for his trouble, and he falls down, wheezing. The man hauls back and hits him in the face; Yusuf tries desperately to block it, trying to see around him to see Nicolo, to make sure Nicolo can still get up, can still run, but all he gets is more smoke in the eyes and another strike to his face.

“Fuck,” the man snarls as Nicolo dives at the backs of his knees, pushing him sideways and away from Yusuf.

But Nicolo is staggering, his lip bleeding, and the man kicks him viciously in the knee. 

Bone cracks under the force of the blow, and Nicolo falls to the ground, gasping in pain, made worse by the hit to his stomach that he earns on the way down.

“Nicolo,” Yusuf gasps desperately, pulling himself along the ground, bones healing but not fast enough. “Nico--”

“Joe, run,” Nicolo gasps, eyes desperate when they lock onto Yusuf’s, “Go!”

Yusuf shakes his head, trying to communicate that he isn’t leaving here, not without Nicolo, and he groans as he drags himself forward more, cursing his femur for taking too long to straighten. He stops moving when the large man points his gun between his eyes -- if he dies, he has no way to protect Nicolo. No way to control the situation.

He stops moving, and watches the gun warily.

“Wait a second.” The man pauses, gun pointed at Yusuf, his eyes down at Nicolo. “Wait. You aren’t healing.”

Nicolo spits out some blood from his busted lip and glares up at the man. He gets a boot to the chest for his trouble, and he groans as the man clearly puts weight on it. Yusuf hisses and plans a painful, creative death.

 _Where the_ fuck _are Nile and Booker?_

The man looks at Yusuf for a second. He can feel the fracture in his cheekbone knitting together. The wound is older than the one on Nicolo’s mouth, but still. 

He’s healing. Nicolo isn’t.

“Run, Joe,” Nicolo gasps out again, and the man grumbles and grabs Nicolo’s hair, so much longer now, longer and matted with blood and filthy with dust and smoke. 

“Let him go,” Joe tries to scramble to his feet, but he’s still coughing, and the man tsks and shoots him one more time in his other femur.

“You fucking asshole--” Nicolo claws at the hand gripping his hair, but he gets a punch to the throat for it, and he bucks, wheezing — 

_He looks so scared_ , Joe thinks and will think later until the day oblivion takes him, _his Nicolo is so scared_ — 

The man shakes Nicolo by his grip on his hair as Nicolo coughs and tries to breathe.

“You don’t even know who he is.” Their attacker’s laugh is cruel. “ _What_ he is.”

“Please,” Yusuf sobs now, desperately, still trying to get to them, but the gun is pointed at Nicolo as often as it is at him, and something tells him this man is more than capable of killing them both, and one of them permanently. 

“Let him go,” he begs, “you don’t need him. I-- I’ll come with you —“

“He’s been lying to you? Hasn’t he!” The man tsks, using his grip on Nicolo’s hair to roll his head around. His voice is high-pitched, a mimicry, loathsome. “Aw. Did he tell you he loved you?”

Nicolo can only cough, his cheeks ruddy purple from the strain.

“Nico, please, please, I do, I — _don’t hurt him_ —“

“Do you even know who he is?”

Nicolo’s breath stutters, and he grabs the man's forearm. He’s glaring now, with that perfect rage of a heavenly angel, with that strange, deadened calm that only he’s capable of.

Nicolo says in a voice oddly clear and sure: “He’s the love of my life, you son of a bitch.”

Time stops.

* * *

Time had gone so quickly for Yusuf al-Kaysani over the centuries, to the point where it had been a blur for decades. Dilation is a hell of a thing, but ever since he met Nicolo Genova, time had slowed down. Minutes had meaning again, hours had legends inscribed within them. Days of happiness sang epic songs that bards would envy, and poetry flowed from the year he loved Nicolo Genova to the point where every second was weighed on the scale against the previous nine hundred and fifty-one years, until they were almost evenly matched for worth.

There was not enough time, and all the time in the world, and he could feel it at last, how much value could be inside the passage of it all, how he could sink into moments where Nicolo brushed his nose against his eyelids, into moments where their hands met, into moments where his smile lit up the room as they ate cold sandwiches in the kitchen, into moments where his kiss lingered against his lips.

Time had gone so quickly until it hadn’t.

And now: Time stops.

* * *

The man shoves his gun in Nicolo’s mouth and pulls the trigger. 

Yusuf screams, inhuman and broken and terrified. 

“Nicolo!” He hears himself screaming, “Nico!”

There is no answer; the man laughs and stands up and steps away from Nicolo’s body. 

Yusuf cannot look at him. Not now. 

He staggers to his feet, takes two bullets to the chest, somehow keeps running. He flies into the man who shot Nicky. He breaks his face first, breaks the smug smile right off of him, doesn’t stop moving until there’s only blood where there used to be discernible features.

“Bring him back!” Yusuf hears himself shouting. “Bring him back, you fucking son of a --”

He knows no one will answer that. He knows no one is listening.

In the distance, he hears a car pull up to the curb, hears a door slam open and shut, a familiar voice cursing. 

In front of him, he can hear the gurgle of a last word, but he doesn’t try to figure it out. He places his hands on the man’s neck and snaps. He falls to the ground, an empty husk.

Yusuf casts him aside and staggers to his beloved. He looks away as he falls to his knees behind him, in a dark puddle he refuses to acknowledge. 

His Nicolo stares at him, sightless, lifeless, broken. 

He tries to put his hands on his jaw, his lovely, sharp jaw that he spent so many hours kissing, but now there are so many bruises, trails of blood that he cannot unsee.

“Nicolo. Nicolo, _destati_. Nico—“

Warm hands are on his shoulder, and he pushes them away. Nile’s voice reaches him from an eon away. 

“Joe. Joe, please. We have to go. Now.”

There are sirens in the far distance, and the sudden sound of rainfall, and Yusuf wonders if the world is mourning with him.

Nile tugs on his shoulder, and he can hear her sobbing. He can feel her sobbing.

“Oh God -- Booker!” She screams. “Book, _help_!”

The sound of feet pounding pavement, and then a stream of curses in French. 

“Up you get,” Booker says firmly, grabbing Yusuf’s shoulders. 

Yusuf shoves at him more violently and sobs, collapsing back onto Nicolo, covering his sightless eyes and empty face with his torso. “No!” He cries, “No, I won’t leave him--”

“Book.” Nile’s crying too hard to really form the name, but strong hands grab Yusuf under the arms and haul him up with brute efficiency.

He kicks out, shouting, and knocks an elbow back into Booker’s face. It breaks his nose. He doesn’t even care, even if Booker is his closest friend, he doesn’t _care,_ why aren’t they helping him wake up Nicolo? Why aren’t they picking him up, he needs to get into the car with them, he needs --

“I’m sorry,” Nile chokes out, helping Booker drag Yusuf away now. “I’m sorry, Joe, he’s _gone,_ I’m so - I’m so fucking sorry--”

“Nicolo!” Yusuf screams. 

He can see him lying on the floor, so cold, so pale, there are so many bodies, and they can’t just leave Nicolo there, he has to come with them, he can’t be there with that many bodies, he’d be so scared-- 

“Nicolo!”

There’s a blunt impact against the back of his skull and the world goes black.

When he wakes up, he’s in a car with the child locks on, and there’s nothing he can do or say or swear to make them stop the car.

He screams himself hoarse and then switches to sobbing, unaware of Nile crying silently next to him, her hand on Booker’s arm, gripping it as a lifeline while their friend drives them out of the city where Nicolo Genova died.

* * *

Twelve and a half minutes later, and forty-five minutes before police finally respond to the reports of potential gunshots in the vicinity, Nicolo Genova’s body spasms violently.

Nicky jerks upright, plates of bone sealing the back of his skull. He coughs the taste of gunmetal and copper out of his mouth. When his optical nerves heal enough to notice, he realizes there are five bodies in the studio with him.

And he is completely alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here we are.
> 
> Look at us. Look at us. Were theories confirmed? Do you hate me forever? What do you think is going to happen next? Will Joe and Nicky ever see each other again?
> 
> Find out next time, and until then, thank you from the bottom of my heart for every kudos comment bookmark etc that you all have left to encourage me. I wrote this chapter as quickly as possible so y'all could get the fic fix, because you've been so nice.
> 
> So, I'm very sorry for all the angst, and I would love to hear your angry shouting, your angst-reactions, your scowl faces, your hopes for the future, etc.
> 
> [update on 9/16: chapter 9 should pop up some time on 9/17. Working on it right now, but work drained all the words out of me!!!]


	9. Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicky and Joe handle the aftermath of Nicky's murder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (laughing nervously because the chapter count went up and I hope no one notices that)
> 
> You all were SO kind and supportive and I LOVED reading your thoughts on the last chapter!!!! That was one of the first scenes I wrote when outlining this fic, so I am so beyond grateful that you all liked it <3
> 
> This chapter is not NEARLY as intense, but uhhhhhhhh there is some angst. Okay. It's a lot of angst. And plot. And angst. Anyway.
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Residual violence (dried blood, mentions of viscera,)  
> Intense emotions: grief, rage, anxiety, panic attacks, intense depression (the boys have a LOT to process, okay?)  
> Smaller violence/injuries (blood TW mostly)  
> Death of minor characters, not really graphic (esp. compared to last chapter)  
> That's about it for warnings on this one. Wow!

* * *

(November, 2018)

Joe won’t move from the car.

Nile doesn’t have the energy left to haul him up; she can barely hold back her own tears as she pulls herself from the car, the car loaded with things she’s become so _used_ to seeing at Nicky’s place, Nicky’s things that don’t belong to anyone anymore because there _is no Nicky now --_

She wonders what the landlord will think when they come by to pack up his stuff and realize it’s all gone. 

She tries not to think about how there was no one there to pack up her baby brother’s stuff after he died a few years ago. Tries. Fails. 

There’s blood on her pants, from where she knelt next to Joe. Nicky’s blood. More than blood too, viscera she doesn’t want to identify. Her stomach roils horribly, and she plans to burn the pants the second she’s out of them.

“Mon chou?” Booker nudges her after he unfolds his long legs and gets out of the car. “Nile?”

Her hands are shaking, but she stares up at the darkened safe house and speaks firmly. “We can’t let him stay in there all night.”

“He’s slept in worse places--”

“Joe will hotwire the car,” Nile points out, and the small smile falls from Booker’s face. “He’ll go right back to the city and then the cops will find him, or those assholes will find him, and …”

Booker nods. “Right.”

A figure splits off from the dark shadows around the porch and approaches them; she gets as far as the dirt path to their parking spot before speaking, loud enough to be heard from inside the car, with Nile’s door still open.

“Joe.” Andy raises her voice and speaks in Arabic. “Yusuf, come here.”

Joe emerges from the backseat, eyes haunted even in the dim light of the moon that filters through tangled, low-hanging branches. He walks towards Andy as though in a trance, approaching her on the short path, and she stares at him for a long moment.

Then: “Andromache.” Joe’s shoulders tremble, and he sucks in a ragged breath, trying to say something else that collapses into rough sobs.

Andy wraps her arms around Joe in a firm embrace, and then half-leads, half-carries him up the path to the safehouse; they don’t pause when they walk through the door, and Nile and Booker follow slowly. Nile can hear Joe crying through the still-open door, and if she peers into the darkness a little, she can see the way he’s wrapped up in Andy’s arms, weeping into her shoulder as she tangles thin fingers into his curls, holding him close in an embrace more maternal than anything Nile’s seen in years.

Her own chin wobbles dangerously, and her knees follow suit. Nile sits on the front porch step and stares out into the oppressive darkness of the Virginia forest, eighty miles away from DC, and her dissertation, and her darling friend.

Her darling friend who died tonight to save her brother.

Nile senses her breath shaking in her chest, and she breathes in through her nose, feeling it rattle as she fights back open tears. Rolling her eyes up to Heaven, she prays to God to take Nicky’s soul in with love, to see the worth inside of it, to see the good he did. Nicky died for someone he loved, which is exactly how he lived.

Stupid, wonderful, kind, reckless Nicky.

It’s freezing, and her thin jacket isn’t doing anything against the winter chill settling in over them; Nile shivers a little as she tries to blink back hot tears, but a second after she shivers, something warm and big and smelling strongly of tobacco is draped over her shoulders.

Booker’s coat.

The man himself sighs heavily and sits down next to her with a quiet presence she’s grown to appreciate over the decades: Andy’s quiet too, but more in a _calculating how to kill you in a thousand ways, dude_ kind of way. Joe _isn’t_ typically quiet, but the kind of quiet he is right now terrifies Nile more than she wants to admit.

But Booker: he’s a different kind of quiet, hiding a razor wit that he flashes at times like a peacock’s feather or like a forgery he’s particularly proud of. His quiet lets him hold his cards to his chest, and Nile knows by now that his thoughts are louder than any of theirs, forcing him to seek refuge in his vices (vices he’s been working on since Nile met him, but ones that challenge him all the same).

He’s quiet right now, but Nile waits for him to say something: she waits for him to say _I told you so,_ or to ask her if it was worth it, getting close to someone fragile, someone whose brains can be blown out and not be rebuilt afterwards, any kind of question or comment that will have her digging nails into her palm as she tries to escape from the guilt and regret building up in her throat.

When she stiffens at the slightest adjustment to his body language, Booker looks at her, really looks at her. Nile keeps looking at the sky, part of her still trying to desperately barter with God to not let a soul like Nicky’s slip through the cracks. Booker watches her, and Nile bites the inside of her lip, wondering if they’re going to make a joke or if they’re going to switch the subject, or if Booker’s going to try to lecture her (or worse comfort her, empathize with her, given the losses she knows he’s suffered).

All he does is scoot closer to her, and when she leans in, he brings a large, strong arm around her shoulders to hold her there. Nile takes another breath in, and when that one catches and staggers with no chance of getting back up, Booker makes a soft noise in the back of his throat, a sound she’s never heard from him before.

Before she knows it, she’s sobbing and Booker’s guiding her head to his shoulder, murmuring to her in French, low and gentle.

Nile cries, heartsick and wounded, cries for the brother she didn’t get to bury, cries for the friend she won’t get to bury, cries and cries and cries because she feels like she missed out on her own funeral and all she does is get older and older and soon there’s not going to be a single person alive who really knows who she is outside of the four people at this house.

Nile cries like she might fall apart, and Booker holds her so she doesn’t. 

In the morning, they get in the car with a box of Nicky’s things still in the trunk, and they drive for almost fourteen hours until they’ve passed the border in Canada, where they’ll regroup and plan how to get into Europe to best attack Merrick where it hurts the most.

She sits in the front seat, and Booker doesn’t let go of her hand outside of handing over their stack of forged passports at the border.

In the backseat, Joe stares out the window, Andy propped up against his shoulder. His eyes are empty. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t smile.

Nile’s starting to think he might not ever smile again.

* * *

There are five bodies.

Nicky counts them before deciding the number doesn’t really matter so much as _being in a room with a stack of bodies._

He stands and feels like he’s pulling up and away from the earth and not just the ground. There’s blood underneath him, makes the back of his shirt and pants tacky, and he shudders a little. He sees a journal, a lot like the journal that Joe always sketches in, so he grabs it. Grabs the journal, checks his pocket like he always days for phone, wallet, keys --

Nicky only finds the latter two. His phone isn’t anywhere.

Shaking his head, Nicky cricks his neck a little and goes to touch the sore spot. The twinge fades very quickly, which is odd -- what’s also odd is the sticky red that pulls away with his fingers when he stops touching his neck.

_He remembers. The taste of metal, the hatred in the man’s eyes --_

That man is dead now. Nicky can see his body.

_The bodies. One, two, three, four, five --_

_Joe._

Joe’s body isn’t here.

_He’s immortal._

No. That’s … that’s a lot. Nicky … he must have been drugged. Right. He was drugged, and he hallucinated Joe, and he’s probably still hallucinating. Never mind that Nicky hasn’t been near a club or a bar in months, not without Joe or River with him, so … so he probably wasn’t drugged --

Maybe.

Nicky takes a step and kicks a gun by accident. The horrible scrape of it across the concrete of the studio makes his breath hiss as he winces, and his heart starts to slam against his chest. He has to get out of here. He has to -- _why are there so many bodies --_ he has to leave because -- _where is Joe? Call him, call Joe, call the last number he used, but you don’t have a phone because someone took your phone and now you’re trapped here and tomorrow the police will find you --_

Tomorrow … Nicky blinks, remembers, and nods.

He walks out of the door without a second glance behind him, a journal tucked in his hand.

Nicolo Genova stands in his apartment, looking around at the bare walls. The photo of his parents is missing from his bedside table; the dresser drawers have been pulled out, clothes scattered on the floor.

His suit for his dissertation is still hanging up, the tie missing, and Nicky stares at it for a long time.

He’s very tired. He doesn’t have a phone though, and he has to be awake soon, so he finds an ancient alarm clock he grabbed at Goodwill when he was at seminary, checks the batteries, and then sets the alarm for seven a.m.

The sheets on his bed are still there, but his comforter is gone; before he can question it, Nicky curls up on top of it all and falls asleep.

_Water, filling his lungs._

_Lost, desperately lost -- screaming for help but no one can hear. Trapped, feeling like an insane thing, wanting release, needing air, needing sunlight, needing_ her, _going to die again, and again, and again, and again -- water fills the lungs, the body seizes, death wins._

The alarm blares in his ear, and Nicky sits up slowly, wincing at the crackle and pull from the back of his shirt, the side of his neck and ear. He rubs a hand through his hair at the back of his head, barely blinking when dark red flakes fall like snow from his scalp.

He tries to pull his t-shirt over his head and fails. His limbs feel more than a thousand pounds each. Okay. That … that’s probably being tired. If he was drugged last night, he’s exhausted. But. He can’t reschedule. He has to go in.

Nicky does what a therapist years ago told him to do when the panic was threatening to swallow him whole, when the depression was threatening to pull him under again:

He washes his face. He brushes his teeth. He looks in the mirror, then looks away. 

The t-shirt pulls away from his body on the second attempt; he buttons his nicer shirt slowly. He wishes for a sweater, but he can’t seem to find any from his dresser. There aren’t any clothes in his dresser, not really. That’s … odd.

He laces up the shoes set out underneath his suit. He can’t find his comfier shoes, so these will have to do, even if they pinch his feet and he’s always complaining about them to anyone who will listen.

When Nicky pulls the suit jacket over his button down, deciding that jeans will have to be nice enough, he sees the journal he’d taken from the studio last night. He frowns at it for a long moment, and then stuffs it into his backpack. 

_“Powerful people …. We can keep you safe … we have to go …”_

The words come back to him slowly, and anxiety tickles in his throat; Nicky stuffs his laptop and charger into the backpack, and then his passports, the small roll of money he kept under his mattress, as well as his folder containing his important items (certificates, transcripts, medical records on a flash drive).

At the last second, Nicky yanks open his bedside table and finds a Polaroid that he’d gotten at 90s’ Night at a local bar, earlier this year.

They’re smiling in the photo: Joe had been ridiculous and dressed like it was the 1790s. He has a puffy shirt on and tight, tan pants that look miraculous on him, an arm slung around Nicky’s shoulders. Both of them are beaming at the camera, carefree, uncomplicated. Alive.

Nicky smiles at it now, this echo of a past that feels centuries away in the cold, bleak morning, tucks it in his backpack, and hums a little to himself as he swings the backpack over his shoulders. Time to go.

He doesn’t think much about anything as he walks through campus; he hears people talking excitedly about something, but the crowd barely registers to him. He has somewhere to be.

When he arrives at the door to the small classroom, he hesitates before knocking, and he doesn’t relax when a voice tells him to enter.

Dr. Andrews and four other members of the department smile at him as he walks in, his dissertation clutched in his hands. He boots up his laptop and plugs it into the monitor, muttering answers to their pleasant small talk, and he sinks a little more into the strange distance between himself and the world.

“...there’s no need to be nervous, Nick, we’re all rooting for you today,” Dr. Walters reminds him kindly, no doubt because he missed something someone said.

“Right.” He smiles thinly and then nods. “Thank you.” 

This is what he’s immersed himself in for the last several years; before Joe, there was his research. Before al-Kaysani, there were dozens of other poets who cared enough about the scars left by the world, poets who spoke the truth of their love and defied censorship, overcoming cruelty and disinterest and malice and faced it without a shred of terror, or malice. 

There was love then; there has always been love -- isn’t that the whole point?

Nicky blinks and clears his throat when Dr. Andrews nods at him.

“I think … I think the title says it for me,” he begins slowly, pronouncing the words he’s been working on since he got the date for this. “‘We Have Always Been Here;’ today, I’d like to talk about where to look so you can find us, and why it matters.”

He explains his research laboriously; they ask him questions, and he answers them on some sort of auto-response. There’s no particular emotion behind it: there’s just knowledge, the information he’s worked hard to gather for months on end. If he were in a better place, Nicky would be able to realize how cheerful the committee is, how interested, how engaged. Their questions are encouraging, and his answers are more than competent.

Only, he isn’t in a better place; at points, he doubts he’s even _here._

When he talks about the rare translation of al-Kaysani’s love poem, his voice falters, but then he sinks lower into the numbness encasing him and keeps talking although it threatens to finally demolish what’s left of his resolve. 

But, he gets through it, and fifty minutes later, he’s shaking the hands of five people, the last of whom smiles and calls him Dr. Genova. He huffs a laugh because some automatic part of his brain tells him he’s supposed to, and he thanks them all for their time, and he turns to pack up his laptop.

That’s when it happens.

Dr. Andrews, who’d gotten up to congratulate him some more, grips his arm and talks quickly, panicked.

“Nick? Dear God, what happened to you?”

Nicky straightens up, frowning, the strap of his backpack gripped in his hand. “Sorry?”

“Your -- your hair.” Andrews reaches a hand up as though to touch it and then pales and pulls back. “It’s -- there’s blood all down your neck, Nick.”

“Oh.” Nicky blinks, swaying a little and then touches his neck, touches the sticky-dry patch he already knows is there. He’d made himself forget, but something about another person noticing makes him remember. “It’s - it’s nothing,” he assures Andrews, and the other worried faculty behind him, “I must have -- no, I … I hit my head this morning. But, I didn’t want to miss this, so …” 

He touches his head more firmly and smiles. “Barely a scratch,” Nicky lies, grateful that his accent will cover any sort of tremor in his voice. “Already fixed up.”

“Alright.” Andrews gives him a concerned look, but Dr. Maddox laughs and everyone settles a little when he says, “I remember my defense; I don’t think death itself could have stopped me.”

Nicky gives him a small smile and nods. “Right. Yes.”

The walls are spinning a little, and he touches the back of his head again. He tastes metal. Copper. Heat. Lights bursting behind his eyes --

“Maybe go to the health clinic on campus,” Andrews suggests gently. “Get it checked out before going out to celebrate tonight.”

Nicky nods and smiles. “Of course.” He doesn’t bother telling him that he has no one to celebrate with: there was no one there today to sit and listen to his defense. No one in the hallway is waiting to greet him. There’s simply no one.

He thanks them all again and walks out of the building on shaking legs.

Now that his mind is clearing, everything seems to be getting dizzier; there’s a fire engine on the southeast end of campus, smoke rising in the air. A group of kids are taking videos before they head to class, videos of hazy smoke rising to a grey November sky.

“What happened?” He asks a girl after she’s done recording her reaction for Instagram live.

“Oh.” She gives him a brief glance and then gestures at the engines and police cars. “They think a bunch of drug addicts or something broke into the art studios last night and burnt them down. Haven’t found any bodies yet, but a _bunch_ of art was destroyed. Sucks, right?”

She turns to see his reaction, but Nicky’s already gone, slipping through the small crowd of people as he feels his chest start to collapse from the strain of his anxiety. 

He ends up in a public bathroom at the edge of a small park; he doesn’t know how he got here, but Nicky stares at himself in the grimy mirror, seeing the flecks of dried blood under his jaw. Slowly, his hand raises to touch the spot, and then it’s like he can’t stop touching it: he pokes and prods at his scalp, unbroken and intact under the layers of blood and grime.

Vomit rises in his throat, and he feels like he’s sitting at the bottom of a very long tunnel, staring up at himself as he turns on the faucet, grabs a stack of flimsy brown paper towels, and starts to rub viciously at his hair. 

Dirtied towels stack up in the sink as the water runs rust-pink, and soon he’s shaking too hard to keep going, his hair damp and dripping down the back of his nice suit.

“Are you okay?”

Nicky flinches at the unexpected voice, his shins locking around his backpack which he’d dumped on the floor in his haste to get clean. He looks up to see a man staring at him, his beard and rough clothing making it hard to determine his age. There’s compassion in his eyes, and that makes Nicky shake harder.

Somehow -- probably his appearance, really -- he’s able to communicate that no, he’s not well.

“Can I -- do you have someone to call?” The man asks, rubbing his arm nervously as he looks around the cramped, filthy bathroom, no doubt wondering why this strange, shaking man has invaded a moment of privacy for him.

Nicky shakes his head.

“Are you … in some kinda trouble?”

Nicky nods.

The man stares at him for a long moment and then nods back, patting at the pocket of his outer coat until he comes up with a business card. 

“I slept here a few weeks ago, but couldn’t stay long ‘cuz it’s really for kids. You don’t … look that old, but the nun there, she was real kind to me, got me some meds.”

Nicky glances at the card and then almost laughs at the coincidence. “I know her,” he manages to say through his chattering teeth. “I -”

“Are you okay to get there on your own?”

Somewhere in the haze of his anxiety, Nicky’s heart splinters a little for this kind man who has absolutely nothing to gain from helping an apparently unstable stranger. He nods and offers a smile, and the guy clears his throat and glances at the back of his head.

“I wasn’t a medic,” he explains, “but I helped some guys in my unit when they were hurt … d’you want me to …” he gestures at the blood dripping out of Nicky’s hair.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Nicky answers gently, and the guy nods, clearly relieved.

“Thank you,” Nicky says, and it’s the first words he doesn’t have to struggle to get out. “Really. Thank you. I-I’m Nicky -- what’s your name?”

“Frank,” the guy answers, holding his hands out. He looks startled at the sudden tears in Nicky’s eyes. “Uh-”

“Sorry.” Nicky takes his hand and shakes it firmly. “It’s just -- that was my father’s name.”

They look at each other with something that approaches understanding, and then Nicky slips out the door and into the cold morning.

When he reaches the shelter an hour later, he’s shaking again, twitching at every unexpected noise, any pair of eyes that lingers on him for too long; he stands in front of the rainbow painted doors and shivers, glancing up and down the street. His foot bounces off the step, and he goes backwards -- how could he bring this to their doorstep? 

No, better to take his money and … and do what with it? Run back to Italy? Something tells him that the people who wanted Joe would have no problem tracking him there. He has no family here, and limited family over there anyway. 

Nicky takes a step towards the doors again and then pulls back, twisting his fingers together. He shakes his head and decides to see if he can make it on the streets for a while, dodging anyone’s attention, maybe dyeing his hair, when the door swings open and a tiny woman wearing a crew neck grey sweatshirt and a bright pink scarf steps out to stare at him.

“Well?” Sister Monica lifts a grey eyebrow at him. “Are you coming in, Nicolo?”

He nods, abashed, and walks up the steps, mumbling a polite greeting to the nun, who only sighs and closes the door firmly behind her. She locks it, something that doesn’t escape his notice, and then looks at him as he shakes in the foyer, glancing around at the simple crucifix over the door, and the cheerful flyers denoting safe, free, and approved activities around the city.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Sister Monica grabs his arm and hauls him down to her level. “What happened to you?”

Her eyes are on the tracks of blood wrapping around his neck, and Nicky flinches under her gaze. 

“Noth-”

She lets him go and scowls up at him. “Lying was _still_ a sin the last time I checked, Nicolo Michael Genova.”

“I don’t _have_ a middle name, Sister-” Nicky wilts under her maintained glare and nods. “A … a lot happened, I guess.”

“He guesses.” Monica prods and pokes at him until he’s in a hallway, out of sight of the front door. “Are you in trouble?”

He nods, unsure how to verbalize anything yet. 

“If anyone ever knew how to find trouble, it was you.” She sighs and then walks down the narrow hallway, and not sure what else to do, Nicky follows her. 

They end up at the back of the old building, and Sister Monica opens the door to a small cell that reminds him of where he slept at seminary. There’s a twin-sized cot, a small window that’s caked in dirt, and a sink. 

“Sleep,” she says, pointing at the bed. Nicky nods and sets his backpack at the foot of the bed. “You look like death warmed over. I have a thousand questions for you, but I want you to clean up, go to bed, and then tell me when you’re ready.”

“Thank--”

“There’s a shower that locks down the hall, to your left.” Monica taps the doorframe and stares at him before shaking her head. “If anyone comes looking for you, I’ll send them away.”

“Thank you,” he manages to say this time, standing up on shaking legs. “Very much, thank--”

“Towels are in the linen closet across from your door,” is his answer, and then Monica’s gone, no doubt to oversee lunch for the main part of the shelter.

Nicky looks around the cell, and then warily up at the window, worried that some unfriendly face will pop up in it. He takes one of the two thin pillows from the cot and stands on tip-toe to block out the glass so no one can look through it. After a cursory glance at his efforts, Nicky nods to himself, grabs a towel from the provided closet, and then heads to the shower.

He doesn’t let himself think about the chunks of dried blood that come away under his fingernails; he doesn’t let himself think about the way the water turns rusted with parts of himself; he doesn’t let himself think about five dead bodies, the taste of gunmetal, the way light flashed behind his eyes.

Later, when he’s on his cot with the door locked, his wet hair splayed out on the pillow case, Nicky stares at the ceiling as exhaustion creeps over him -- for a second, just for a second, he thinks about the color of Joe’s eyes, which becomes the echo of Joe’s voice as he begged that man not to hurt him, which becomes the way Joe’s hand felt in his before it all went to shit.

He can’t think about it. He doesn’t want to.

So, Nicky accepts the mantle of darkness and lets it pull him under, down into dreams of drowning and dying and endless water. He wakes after each dream, chilled and exhausted but unresistant to sleeping again -- he’s drowned a thousand times in his sleep before, echoes of the day his parents died, a current he can’t outswim. Nicky doesn’t fight the dreams as he sleeps restlessly on a narrow cot in a lonely room.

After all, those dreams are better than remembering the man he loves, the man he never really knew at all. Even dreams where he dies again and again carve him open less than the knowledge that he only ever loved a ghost.

(And now he’s become one, too)

* * *

They travel to Europe on a private plane.

Yusuf sits quietly in a seat by himself, Andy and Nile discussing something quietly at the back of the plane. Booker sits facing him, his head lolling on his shoulder quite convincingly. Even through the numbness that’s seized him, Yusuf knows Booker is actually awake and is sitting so near in case Yusuf … 

In case he ..

Cries? Screams? Rages? Collapses?

He isn’t sure what they expect of him. To be entirely honest, he isn’t sure what he expects of himself. The days since Nicolo died have been empty, exhausting. He’d like to say that his fury with Merrick’s hired goons, with Copley from the CIA, drives him to destruction. To revenge.

Yusuf doesn’t need revenge though.

He just needs Nicky.

His anger lies cold and impotent in his stomach, sending tendrils of ice through his limbs and wrapping around his throat with the certainty that Nicolo’s last moments will haunt him until his own. Killing wicked men will do little to diminish his own guilt; nothing he can do to them will erase the fact that he was the one who hid his identity. He was the one who broke Nicolo’s heart before they stopped it.

No. Yusuf does not think revenge will absolve him from this grief.

When they arrive at the safehouse in Nottingham, he curls up on his side of the bed, Andy a solid, warm presence at his back. He can tell she wants to say something to him, but she also stops right before she does. Yusuf stares at the wall and flinches when he closes his eyes because all he can see is Nicolo, beautiful Nicolo, with the barrel of a gun between his lips.

All he can see is a pair of grey-green eyes staring up at him blankly, blood pooling sickeningly at his legs, in his hands. 

When Yusuf at last falls asleep, the images chase him into the darkness. His mind taunts him with visions of Nicky, whole but still bloody, terrified but running. He watches Nicolo in his dreams and wakes already weeping when he finds his arms empty and cold.

The dreams he’s having are certainly nightmares: Yusuf welcomes them all the same because it’s the only way he can see Nicolo’s face one last time.

* * *

Nicky sleeps for three days and finally emerges, blinking, into the mess hall after breakfast has already been served.

Sister Monica watches him approach, wearing the same plain sweatshirt but a bright yellow scarf today. She gives him a rare smile as he sits across from her at a long lunchroom style table. After offering him a cup of tea, she settles down to sit with him with her own cup.

“Christ also rose after three days,” Monica jokes, a playful sort of blasphemy that would have made him politely choke on his tea five years ago.

Nicky only stares at the laminate tabletop; he offers a small shrug.

“What happened to you?” 

“You’ll think I’m insane,” Nicky mutters, his face ruddy with the anxiety of even _thinking_ about talking of this.

The older nun gives him a long, searching look when he at last looks up at her. “Try me.”

So he does. He explains haltingly how he’d fallen in love with Joe, how Joe had disappeared, how he’d come back three days ago with an insane story, and then when all hell broke loose, how Nicky had discovered …

“I can’t die,” Nicky whispers. “At least. I didn’t that time.”

Monica had remained silent for most of his story, but now that he retracts back into himself, his shoulders rounding up towards his ears, she lets out a long breath.

“And this isn’t some … tall tale?”

Nicky shakes his head with a rueful smile. “I wish.”

“And you haven’t … forgive me, but: you aren’t hearing voices? Or feeling an urge to hurt yourself?”

“No.” Nicky sighs. “I thought about _testing_ it. To see if it was a … fluke. But it felt wrong.”

“I see.” Monica taps her wrinkled fingers against her mug. “Well. You were _covered_ in blood when you showed up. And you did sleep like the dead … for three days.”

Then, she says: “It must be a miracle.”

Nicky snorts and immediately apologies. “Sorry, sorry Sister. It’s -- no. It’s not … that.”

“Oh?”

“No. This doesn’t feel miraculous.” He’d side-stepped the part where he’d stabbed a man, and the part where he woke up around five dead bodies that his ex-maybe-not-ex-boyfriend had personally murdered, but he hopes his tone gets the message across well enough without those sticky details. 

“I think I’m in Purgatory,” Nicky confesses after a long moment. “At least, that’s the only thing I _can_ think.”

It’s Monica’s turn to snort. “I think _I_ would remember dying.” Then, more kindly, she adds, “look into your soul, Nicolo. You’ll see that isn’t true.”

Nicky doesn’t know what to say to that either; he thinks it might be rude to tell a seventy-year-old nun that he isn’t sure he _has_ one of those anymore, if he’s some hellish immortal vampire, doomed to walk the world and never die with Cain’s mark upon him.

It’s exhausting to even think about.

“And your Joe,” Monica says abruptly, “he … disappeared?”

Nicky nods and feels his chin wobble dangerously. Monica tsks at him and pushes his tea more aggressively towards him until he takes it and sips gingerly, tears still biting at his eyes. 

“We need to get you safe before you start crying over a boy,” Monica says sternly. “Got it?”

“Got it,” he agrees with a whisper.

They sit quietly after that, Monica content to sit with her cup of tea, and Nicky staring into space, trying not to think about a boy, lest he again incur the wrath of a woman who comes up to his elbow.

* * *

In the end, it’s something like destiny that offers Nicky refuge.

Sammy calls. 

Sweet, lost Sammy who found her family and traveled north. She calls on the Tuesday after Nicky’s arrival at the shelter, and Sister Monica drags him into the frame after Sammy’s done excitedly showing the nun her new collection of cacti. There’s a screech of excitement when Sammy sees Nicky’s face, and a second later, he’s crying again as Sammy shows off her little, private cabin on her aunt’s campground up in Maine.

Monica has a stern, thinking face on as Nicky awkwardly catches Sammy up on his life (“no, no more boyfriend,” he manages to say, and, “got my doctorate, but it’s complicated”). By the time the call is done, Sister Monica has already pulled out her laptop and is firing off an email with a mischievous look in her eyes.

Her solution becomes apparent quickly: Sammy’s aunt and her wife respond within a day, and soon Nicky finds himself clutching a one-way ticket to Maine. Sister Monica found a black shirt and black pants that fit him, and he’s wearing a clerical collar that he tries not to tug at as Sister Monica completes her transformation of him with thick glasses that had been left behind in the lost and found.

“There,” she declares, dusting her hands off and taking a step back. “A new person.”

Nicky looks in a nearby window and has to admit he _does_ look different. A different life flashes before his eyes: one where he’d never encountered that awful man, one where he completed his studies, took his vows, and became Father Nick, not Dr. Genova with a PhD he can’t ever claim if he’s going on the run, and an ex-maybe-not-ex-boyfriend who somehow passed on the curse of immortality to him.

(That’s not charitable, he thinks to himself as he tucks his shirt into his pants, that’s not fair -- he doubts Joe could have _given_ him immortality. It’s not an STD, for fuck’s sake, and Joe’s reasons for hiding it were pretty clear: being unable to die is absolutely horrific as a concept, and Nicky’s still banking on that _one time thing_ being just that -- a one time thing).

He hugs Sister Monica for what feels like a lifetime at the dingy bus stop at Chinatown, all of his belongings now transferred into a nondescript duffel bag with his backpack folded up and tucked in at the bottom. 

“Good luck, Christopher,” Monica says with a wink, tapping the fake name on his ticket as the bus idles loudly next to them, spitting out exhaust that clashes with the smell of the city.

“Christopher?” He repeats with a smile.

Monica reaches up with a withered hand, and Nicky leans down so she can put her palm to his cheek. “Patron saint of travelers,” she says, uncharacteristically gentle.

Nicky’s ears heat up, and he nods, fighting back more tears. “Thank you,” he stumbles over the words, “I’ll never be able to thank you enough -- those men, if they come looking for me--”

“I’ll say that I haven’t seen you in years.” Sister Monica puts her hands on his bag and pushes a little before he can spit out the apology waiting behind his teeth. “Now go. Don’t look back.”

Nicky -- Christopher to the disinterested driver who checks his ticket -- climbs onto the bus and settles into a seat; no one takes the aisle after he settles, and he glances out the window to see a tiny woman with a bright blue scarf waving fondly as the bus pulls away from the curb and out into city traffic.

He doesn’t settle; not once in sixteen hours does he settle. 

There’s a transfer at Boston, and then a nerve-racking hour wait at the terminal there for his connecting line to Portland; two and a half hours on a much smaller, much louder bus leave Nicky twitching and his heart in his throat whenever anyone looks at him for too long. 

The landscape outside the window changes, and as most of the overhead lights have shut off given that it’s four in the morning, Nicky can barely make out the _Welcome to Maine!_ sign. This is the farthest north he’s ever been, but he doesn’t feel anything at all about it. 

He thinks about gunmetal. Lights. Copper. He cries more than once, but no one seems to give the awkward, bespeckled priest a second glance, their eyes sliding right over him as he hunches over his collection of worldly possessions. That’s good; it helps him to push down the paranoia, but the less on-edge he is, the more time he has to think about Joe, and lying, and immortality, and how _he hasn’t slept in twenty hours_ and while the idea of sleep sounds _nice,_ he isn’t sure he’s nearly groggy or exhausted enough physically to justify being awake for this long.

He arrives in Portland at six in the morning, and he doesn’t stand in the terminal there for long; a familiar face pops up in the crowd, and Nicky wants to hiss at Sammy to stop waving, to stop drawing attention, but she looks so truly happy to see him, and soon a young woman with Sammy’s nose and jaw gives him a hug, and then a pretty woman in her thirties does too.

Nicky finds himself tucked in the backseat of a Jeep, heading north still, and with the comfortable, soothing conversation of the women around him, some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. He tugs the clerical collar off and tucks it in his duffel bag with the glasses, and he breathes easier as cold salt-air bleeds into the car.

“We don’t have Wi-Fi in the cabins,” Margot says apologetically, glancing in the rearview mirror at him. 

He’s almost distracted by the flash of the sun over the grey Atlantic, light fighting against the cloud cover on the dark morning, but he remembers to respond. “That’s more than alright,” he promises. “As long as I can find something to read. I don’t need much.”

“We have plenty of books,” Rachel assures him, smiling at him from the front seat. “And we play games every night.”

“And we go on hikes,” Sammy tells him, still excited like they’re bringing him up to sleepaway camp and not hiding him from whatever horror that Sister Monica must have told them about. “We saw a bear last week!”

“A bear.” Nicky laughs and shakes his head. “I’ve never seen one of those up close.”

Sammy launches into a (hopefully hyperbolized) story about how the bear walked right up to them while they were walking their four dogs, and that helps them to get all the way up through the trees to the campground where her aunts own a number of cute cabins.

They give him a private cabin in the back, and Nicky fumbles, wanting to give them some of the money that he has tucked away, the emergency cash he’s been storing away since he left seminary (it used to be _hospital_ money, but something eerie at the back of his thoughts thinks that _maybe_ hospitals and insurance in general aren’t going to be an issue from here on out). 

Margot folds his fingers back over the envelope he tries to extend and shakes her head. “This place was a gift to us from Rachel’s father, and we make more than enough to keep the lights on. You saved our Sammy.” Her voice breaks a little. “We’re happy to have you here, Nicky.”

And that’s that. 

He slips into his room with the promise of lunch around twelve; it’s bigger, much bigger than his cell at the shelter, the windows framed by cheery yellow curtains. It smells like mothballs, and there are rat traps in the corner, a minifridge outside the bathroom door. The door locks, and he has his own dresser -- Sammy said something about a Goodwill close to town, and how they could go and get him some new clothes.

He’s exhausted. His mind is still reeling from the last ten days of his life, and he wants to vomit more often than not. He can’t think about Joe without crying. He can’t sleep without dreaming of Joe or dreaming of dying. When he closes his eyes, he can see that man standing over him, can taste the metal of the gun, can feel the way the bullet cut through him before the lights burst.

But, as he curls up under the stale-smelling comforter and sees a tiny, potted cactus left on the windowsill, Nicky feels something for the first time in weeks.

Hope.

* * *

“I don’t see why this plan involved you getting captured,” Joe tells Booker three days after the New Year. “We could have just shot the bastards.”

Booker grins up at him, blood staining his chin, as Joe tugs on the straps holding him down to the table. “Why, Joe, that’s too good of a plan for _me_ to come up with.”

Joe snorts and offers a hand to Booker, hauling him off the table. He checks the chamber of his gun and then hands Booker the spare gun, tucked in the back of his jeans. 

“Besides, I think this is the first time I’ve seen you smile in months,” Booker points out, wobbling a little as the surgical incision that had been forced to stay open by painful-looking medical staples finally heals shut.

Joe lifts his eyebrows, and Booker rolls his eyes at him, muttering something in French about _not the time, not the time, I know._

“Thanks for coming to get me,” Booker says gratefully as they head to the exit of the lab; they stole back all the data the woman had gathered from him, and Joe tries to summon some kind of remorse for how quickly he had killed her, but he hadn’t taken well to seeing Booker carved open on her table.

He won’t ever admit it, but the only thought in his head when he saw Booker, grey-faced and gasping in pain, was _not him too; you can’t take him, too._

“Eh.” Joe lifts his gun and fires three times, killing the guards that spill into the room in an attempt to stop them. “Nile missed you.”

“She did?” Booker pauses and blinks, surprised. Then: “Fuck!”

He gets shot through the side in his distraction. Joe chuckles and shoots the man who’d gotten the lucky shot in, and then grabs Booker, hauling him along as they head for the lift. “We gotta get to the roof,” he tells Booker. “At least, I do.”

“Don’t tell me,” Booker groans, leaning against the wall, oozing thick blood between his fingers as he waits to heal. “Sao-”

“Sao Paulo,” Joe finishes with an empty grin. “1834.”

“Terrible year,” Booker mutters. “That’s when I realized you two were _insane._ ”

“Had to figure it out sometime.”

An hour later, Stephen Merrick is dead, and his stocks, shares, and accounts have been broken down and creatively redistributed to charities around the world with some help from Sebastien le Livre. His broken body had been somewhat poetically impaled on a international peace award from some bullshit organization, and none of them looked back as they sped off, away from the building.

Booker groans when they pass over pot holes; it earns him eye rolls from Andy at the driver seat, but when Joe looks into the back, he sees Nile pressing a hand to the bloody stain on Booker’s shirt, concern written all over her lovely face.

“Does it hurt?” She asks, pushing in a little over skin that Joe _knows_ has healed by now.

“Not anymore,” Booker mutters, covering her hand with his large, roughened one. They exchange a look so intimate that Joe has to look through the windshield. 

He doesn’t envy them. Envy is a hateful feeling; he doesn’t want them to lose what they have. He wants them to be happy. He would never begrudge them their happiness, even if they take another few decades to figure it out.

They have _time_ though, and they’re able to look at each other and touch each other and they actually _can_ figure it out, and the last time Joe ever saw Nicky, Nicolo had been terrified, and Joe had still been Yusuf, still a man who thought the world could work a certain way, a man who still believed in love poems he’d written centuries before. Yusuf had lost Nicolo, lost him terribly, and they hadn’t had enough _time._

He’d worn a different name, taken a different past, and cloaked himself in a lie; and somewhere in the middle, Yusuf had become envious of Joe Jones. Had sunk into that new skin too fully, become lost to it. And he has _no idea_ how to let go of the life he could have had, the life that was taken from them.

Andy sees him staring, and she nudges his forearm as she goes to change gears. “Rethinking your no alcohol policy?” She half-jokes, speeding along the road to head out of the city. “Because I could use a fucking drink right now.”

Joe shakes his head, remembering that he’s supposed to smile at her, but he does so a half-second too late. She doesn’t call him on it. 

Andy just keeps driving, her sharp eyes locked on the road, and Joe hates himself a little because she’d lost _so much_ when they lost Quynh. She’d lost centuries of time, centuries of love, and the possibility for centuries more. He’d lost a sister when Quynh was taken, but Andy had lost her greatest love, who she should have had forever with.

Yusuf and Nicolo had only received a year together, two months of which had been wasted on Yusuf leaving Nicolo behind. They’d only had those precious months, and now Yusuf doesn’t even _feel_ like Yusuf anymore. No; Joe sees the world through new eyes, a hole in his chest that never heals, never scars, the one hurt his immortality can’t fix because it’s the cause of the wound.

Yusuf lost Nicolo, decades too early, and in a grotesque way; and now Joe has to figure out how to carry on without him, only catching glimpses of a perfect, beautiful echo in his dreams, living without Nicky for the rest of his long, miserable life.

* * *

After he settles into his new life, Nicky takes to sitting out on the beach, staring at the waves, trying to figure out what his dreams tell him. The journal he’d taken from the art studio that night in November is propped on his knees, the pen in his hand as he takes studious notes, trying to record everything he recalls from his nightmares. 

Sometimes, he sees Joe. He doesn’t try to figure that one out. It’s his subconscious being kind (even if he doesn’t understand why Joe cries in every dream he has of him; if his subconscious wants to be kind and show him Joe Jones -- or, Yusuf al-Kaysani, really -- Nicky doesn’t understand why it won’t just let him see Yusuf happy).

Instead, he writes about a beautiful woman with jet black hair, trapped at the bottom of the ocean. He tries to decipher her story, but something tells him that it’s not his to write, not his to speculate on. Instead, he writes the flashes he can see, the things he can remember. 

He writes about the taste of gunmetal. The flash of lights behind his eyes.

It’s the journal that gives him his first noticeable injury after the night everything fell apart: a papercut on his thumb that has him hissing three days after arriving in Maine.

He watches, horrified, as the cut seals up in less than a minute. 

When he bangs his toe on a doorframe, running to the toilet to vomit after a particularly bad flashback, he watches the smashed-in toenail pop back out, healing quicker than the papercut. 

A cut on his chin that seals up within seconds causes Nicky to throw away his razors. He grows out his beard all winter, taking to wearing a knit cap over his long hair, warming his ears against the strong chill of the Maine shore. He wears fisherman sweaters and loose jeans, and helps out around the campground. 

Margot, Rachel, and Sammy include him in their warm bubble, inviting him to dinners and game nights and giving him books when the days grow terribly short, but most days he feels distant, separate.

They’ve been so kind to him, but they don’t know anything about him.

Sometime in January, when he watches a twisted ankle straighten back out after tripping in the woods, the bone disappearing under skin that knits itself back together, Nicky realizes that he almost understands why Joe -- no, _Yusuf_ \-- lied to him for so long. Almost sort-of understands the lie, if he squints at it and doesn’t let himself cry or become personally hurt by it. 

After all, how could he ever explain this to someone? How could he tell someone whose pain doesn’t disappear, someone whose cuts linger, whose bruises turn yellow and ache for weeks, whose hangnails remain, whose joints throb -- how could he _ever_ let them know that none of that is true for him any longer?

_How could he tell them that he’d give anything to hurt and stay hurt? That all he wants is the promise of death one day? That he’s been given an obvious gift from the universe, and all he wants is to give it back?_

They would never forgive him. 

When he’s done writing about the dreams of the previous night, Nicky always ends up writing to Joe, all of the pages he fills addressed to _Yusuf,_ the man he only probably saw flashes of, the man he’d give anything to know better. 

Letter after letter after letter: he shares everything he’s thinking, captures everything he’s seen and felt and touched that day. Nicky writes letters to Yusuf about every piece of himself, every doubt that lingers, every wound that he swears he can still feel days after it’s perfectly healed.

He asks questions, and tries to answer them for himself. He demands to know _why_ Yusuf didn’t tell him; he forgives Joe; he blames Yusuf; he loves him, he loves him --

Nicky loves him. He’s never going to see him again. He realizes this in February and spends four days locked in his cabin, crying when he stays awake, and dreaming of drowning in an entirely different kind of salt water when sleep grabs onto him.

He doesn’t stop writing to Yusuf, even if it feels like he’s taking a knife to his own chest every time he does, each word carving into him until he’s sure they’ll be nothing left, healing or not.

By March, nightmares of drowning fade away to dreams of light, bright and confusing. Flashes of docks and conversations flit through his sleep, and Nicky can’t make heads or tails of it. He still dreams of Yusuf sometimes, and of River too (she at least looks happy, if tired, and that’s nice, to think that she’s out there in the world somewhere, happy and untouched by the shittiness of his life).

He doesn’t understand why the drowning has left him, if that’s the vision of death God has chosen to plague him with. 

He doesn’t understand why until one night in the rain, there’s a banging at his door that startles him from a half-slumber over a book of Frost’s poems.

It’s Sammy at the door, beaming up at him. “Someone’s here to see you!” She chirps. “An old friend!”

“Did you tell your aunts?” Nicky asks blearily.

“Nah, they went to dinner in town tonight,” Sammy explains, half-turning with the hood of her yellow slicker pulled over her hair.

His mind starts to sharpen into something dangerous -- _no one should know he’s here,_ he remembers. Nicky prepares to pull Sammy into the cabin and not let her out until whoever’s come for him is dead: he’s never killed anyone, but he figures he’d rather they die than Sammy --

A figure comes out of the rain, and Nicky stills in half-formed recognition. 

“Told you he was awake!” Sammy says excitedly to the beautiful woman who draws towards the warm light spilling out from Nicky’s open door. 

“He is,” the woman agrees with a sharp smile. “Thank you, dear. I think we’ll catch up if you want to run back inside before you catch a cold.”

Sammy nods and disappears back towards the main cabin with a cheerful wave.

Turning to Nicky, the woman holds a hand out, and he takes it, trying to decide if he’s dreaming again.

Because he’s seen her face hundreds of times, twisted in pain, screaming, underwater --

“Nicolo,” she greets him fondly. “It’s so _nice_ to finally meet you. My name is Quynh. I think we need to talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO ANYWAY I'm sorry I'm so sorry this is 11 chapters now, I just want the last last chapter of this to be really soft and happy if I can manage it, if you all don't think that cheapens it, and my original "chapter 9" was OVER SIXTEEN THOUSAND WORDS LONG so I slashed it in half ... I hope that's okay. Meep. Meep!
> 
> I would love to hear some theories, any thoughts on Quynh/what's going to happen now, and if/when Joe and Nicky will be reunited ;) Thank you thank you for your continued support ... and I'm so sorry that there's more of this now .....
> 
> [but hey, we know Nicky is definitely immortal now, so hopefully that ... makes it better?] Next chapter should be up pretty quick, considering it's ... mostly written. Oops.
> 
> (also, I managed to get through half the comments from the last chapter to individually respond, but I am SO Tired and need to go to bed, so I will hopefully finish responding tomorrow!! thank you to EVERYONE who's commented or left a kudos/bookmark/etc)


	10. With All Your Crooked Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicky and Quynh adjust to life together while Joe struggles with the weight of his grief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE WE ARE
> 
> HERE WE GO -- this chapter actually IS the longest, oops!! Unless I make the last chapter suuuuuuper long?! 12000+ words await you in this chapter, friends.  
> You all had some great theories for this chapter (sorry if you were banking on Quynh being evil, um, she's ... she's not. Sorry, writers of 2 Old 2 Guard, Quynh isn't evil! Not in this fic! Nope!)
> 
>  **warnings**  
>  Canon Typical Violence  
> Temporary Character Death  
> Grief/Angst  
> Discussions of drowning  
> Depression/anxiety in POV characters

* * *

_The first gasp of breath is the most painful._

_It’s beautiful and it fills me up up up until it might just burst and then …_

_Let it out. Nothing else comes back in. More air. Only air, sipping air, fresh and free and all around and not a drop of --_

_Bright. Too bright. It’s sharp in the world, and there’s no way to soften it. Clothes -- need new clothes._

_Voices. Not here; in my head. Who is who? There are others. They don’t know where I am. I should …_

_How long?_

_… Too long._

_Where is --_

_No. Not here. Left. Left me; or forgot about me._

_No. Impossible. Love is forever; until the end of time, you and me. Until the end._

_This isn’t the end._

_It’s the beginning._

A woman lies on a beach, rocks under her palms as she laughs up at a grey sky. Waves lap at her feet, but she thinks that they can’t touch her anymore.

She’s free.

Her eyes drift shut as exhaustion sweeps over her:

_Booker, sweet Booker, sweet, broken, angry, gentle Booker. Put the bottle down, friend. I have to meet you, and I’d rather you were sober for it._

_Nile, glorious, warm, funny, strong, smart Nile. Clever girl. Love you already. Doctor Nile Freeman. Warrior, genius. Sister._

And -- no, he’s new, she can see him more clearly now, the images no longer muddied by hundreds of feet of water, new and ...

_Scared. Lost. Confused. Wandering._

_“Joe,” he cries out in his sleep, always the same name, “Joe, please--”_

_No one’s there for him. He’s alone, abandoned, grieving, hurt._

“Little brother,” she whispers in her sleep as new dreams flit behind her eyelids. “I’ll find you.”

_We aren’t meant to be alone._

* * *

Nicky stares at the newcomer.

It’s admittedly the most interesting thing that’s happened in months; since he came to Maine, he’s settled into a very regular routine of: 

Wake up

Walk along the shore

Miss Joe and River

Write to make sense of his thoughts

Think about Joe

Keep walking

Eat something

Miss Joe, and miss him so badly that he forgets to finish eating

Get angry all over again

Try not to fall asleep as long as possible

Sleep and have nightmares anyway.

So, a woman showing up in the middle of the night, walking out of a storm like a goddess who fell from the heavens, who knows his name, is definitely a way to break the monotony.

“Quynh,” he repeats, sitting on the small desk under the window. “Please, sit.” He gestures at the bed, and Quynh eyes it before sitting gingerly at the foot of it, her legs crossed under her sweeping skirt.

“Your house appears very comfortable,” she notes, patting the comforter with a delicate hand. “But where do you keep your weapons?”

“My weapons?” Nicky repeats, confused.

Quynh lifts an eyebrow and holds her red coat open for a moment so Nicky can see the assortment of blades she’s wearing on her person, that she has tucked into the fabric. She then pulls her skirt up a little to show another dagger in her boot, and then pulls her sleeve back to show what looks like a throwing star in her wrist.

“Uh.” Nicky rubs his neck awkwardly, wondering if he’s having some strange lucid dream. “If you are here to kill me, I have very bad news for you.”

To his surprise, Quynh barks a laugh, her face lighting up with it. “Oh.” She pats her cheeks and then laughs again, softer. “Oh, that’s my first laugh in … in a long time. Thank you, Nicolo.”

She says his name correctly; it makes him think of Yusuf and how he’d said it correctly when they’d met, how gently he’d formed the vowels. How precious he made it sound.

Nicky clears his throat, and Quynh taps her knee with the palm of her hand, her eyes still darting around the cabin. 

“I beg your pardon,” she says, “but do you think you could … extinguish your lantern?” She gestures at the lightbulb burning bright over the bathroom, and Nicky nods, not even questioning it.

Basic politeness has him acquiesce, and he flips it off before remembering that now he’ll be even easier to kill because he can’t see a damn thing.

But Quynh makes no move to get up from the bed, and she sighs in relief when darkness shutters over the small room. “Much better, thank you. Light remains an overwhelming thing, Nicolo. All I knew was darkness for a long time.”

Nicky frowns at that, and he pulls out the chair at his desk all the way so he can sit and face the vague outline of his guest on his bed. “Did Merrick send you?”

“Is that the name of the little British rat?” Quynh chuckles. “No. He’s dead. Nile killed him. Well, Yusuf helped.”

And just like that, cold water pours over his body; Nicky freezes, his heart lodged in his throat. “You … you know J- Yusuf?”

“Of course I do.” Quynh stretches, and his eyes must be adjusting to the dark because he can see the playful gleam in her eyes. “He’s my little brother, after all.”

Nicky can only blink stupidly. “Um.”

“I know, we possess quite the family resemblance. Well, we share the most important trait: you’ll find it’s rather hard to kill me, too.” Quynh trails her hands along the edge of the bed frame and then bounces a little. “This is really quite soft, Nicolo. How many geese did you have to pluck?”

“It’s polyester,” he says, not sure what else to get out of his head because What the Ever Loving Fuck is happening to him.

( _Well, why not get murdered by a beautiful, mysterious woman who knows the man who broke my heart,_ he thinks somewhere below his numb confusion, _this year is already so goddamn weird_ )

“Polyester,” Quynh repeats and then smiles, dazzling even in the darkness. “I like it.”

“I’m sorry, but … why are you here?” He remembers to ask again, trying to get out of his head. “And … you know J-- _Yusuf_?”

“I met Yusuf in 1190,” Quynh says casually. “It was much harder to find someone back then, so it took Andromache and I almost a century to find him.”

Like that’s a very normal statement to say to a nervous stranger who is at his absolute wits’ end and is wondering if one of the last three Xanax he has crammed in a pocket of his backpack might work on him now that he seems resistant to many things.

“Of course,” Nicky says faintly.

“I found you through my dreams too; I saw a sign for the little town up the road through your eyes, and I … was already on the shore not too far from this place.” Quynh sighs and folds her hands together. “You’re brand new, aren’t you?”

Nicky nods. 

“How old?”

“Twenty-nine,” he mumbles. “At least … I think I’m twenty-nine.” He clears his throat a little and asks a question that’s been bothering him since he realized how quickly he healed. “Um - do we … you know. Age?”

“Not at all.”

Nicky winces. “Right. Well, I … this started in November of last year, and it’s almost April now. I turned, um … my birthday was in January.”

“So you were twenty-eight when you died the first time?”

“The first time,” Nicky repeats weakly.

“Of course. The first time. You’ll die quite a few times. Do not worry, you get used to it.” She tilts her head a little. “You … haven’t died again?”

“No.” Nicky clears his throat. “I was a student at university -- it … it really shouldn’t have been that dangerous.”

“Interesting.” Quynh considers this. “No plagues? Gangrene? Horse accidents?”

“We have vaccines,” Nicky counters.. “And I took a bus here. I guess it could have crashed, but that’s not really an expectation of road travel, more of a precaution.”

Quynh thinks for a moment. “Bus,” she says after a pause. “I think I might have taken one of those to get here, too. Large, rectangular, many seats inside, smells faintly of cheese?”

“I think that depends on the bus.”

“It was _very_ efficient, and they told me not to worry about the fare. Is currency no longer an issue?”

Nicky raises his eyebrows. “Money’s definitely a thing. People really care about money. I am pretty sure that’s why I was killed.”

“A roadside mugging! By bandits!” Quynh seems unfairly excited by that prospect. “Now _those_ I remember!”

“No.” Nicky shakes his head with a small grin, so fucking confused by all of this, but finding it much more entertaining than his previous goal for the night, which was to re-watch a season of Parks and Rec until he fell asleep. “No, some men wanted to experiment on … Yusuf,” he swallows the bile in his throat, “to see if they could figure out why he was immortal.”

He doesn’t imagine the low hiss from Quynh; he can see her face more fully now, his eyes adjusted to the dark, and her glare is terrifying. 

“They didn’t capture him,” he assures her gently, even though she probably knows that much. “He’s okay. One of them shot me when I tried to help him, and I guess that’s how I died … the first time,” he adds as an afterthought, wincing.

“Well that was stupid of you,” Quynh says firmly. “If you thought you _could_ die, you should have just run. Yusuf could have gotten himself out of trouble; he’s one of the greatest warriors to ever live, he’s killed _thousands_ of men.”

She says the last part proudly, the way a parent talks about their child’s place on the Honor Roll.

“As I recall, it wasn’t going well for Yusuf either!” Nicky protests, feeling oddly defensive of his final choices on that horrible night.

“Let me guess, he was very distracted with trying to make sure you, a mortal as far as he knew, stayed alive?”

Nicky’s silence is deafening, and Quynh sighs and shakes her head.

“He loves you so much,” she says, her voice changing. She sounds sad. Wistful. “He’s so sad without you, Nicolo.”

He swallows harshly again, but this time he’s holding back tears. “He told you this?”

“No.” Quynh picks at a thread in her coat. “I have not seen him since, oh, 1604?”

“That’s over four hundred years.” Nicky shakes himself a little. “Right. Right, immortal, sorry, this is … I’m still getting used to this.”

“That’s alright. It’s been thousands of years for me, but I was still adjusting when I found Andromache. I remember that very well.” She smiles in the darkness, lost to her thoughts.

It’s a full minute before she speaks again, and Nicky sits in the quiet, uncomfortable and anxious, vibrating out of his skin.

“Sorry,” he says, actually apologetic for breaking off whatever pleasant thought Quynh is stuck in. “It’s just -- how do you know Joe is sad if …”

“I see him through Nile and Booker,” Quynh says, like it’s supposed to make perfect sense. “Oh, I see. Well, your dreams, Nicolo. What have you dreamed of late?”

“I … I’ve been dreaming of drowning,” Nicky says slowly, not missing how Quynh draws in on her self, wraps her arms around her middle. “And I dream … of not much else. Sometimes I see Joe, but I think that’s because I miss him. The same with my friend River.”

“River?” Quynh comes back to herself a little and she grins, sharp and fierce. “Oh, what a fun name for her; I suppose that is why I saw glimpses of you before you died. She was calling herself River.”

Nicky’s stomach clenches. “What?”

“River, Nile, Nile River.” Quynh laughs and shakes her head. “She’s another immortal.”

“No, no, she’s … she’s my friend River Banks. I see her now because - because she was my best friend, and … and she left ... “ he licks his bottom lip and trails off. “...the same day … Joe did.”

“Young, black, wonderful jackets?” Quynh lists off, and Nicky wilts into his chair, his thoughts racing. “Pretty and funny and smart? Maybe this tall,” she gestures in the air, “and wears her hair in long braids--”

“I get it,” Nicky says bitterly. He leans forward and buries his face in his hands. “Oh my God, they must think I’m some … some _chump._ They all just pretended to ... “ He wants to be sick, and he eyes the door, wondering about the etiquette of abandoning an immortal woman with thirteen knives strapped to her person in your own house.

“For what it’s worth, I see them when I dream, and they miss you too much for it to be pretend.” Quynh draws her knees up to her chest and watches rain tilt at the window behind Nicky. She spends another minute staring, and only startles when Nicky leans back and scuffs his feet along the floor. “Sorry. What were we …” her eyes are still locked on the rain hitting the window.

“Is everything alright?” Nicky asks, concern taking over from his anxious embarrassment at the fact that he didn’t realize that _River fucking Banks_ wasn’t a real name. When she doesn’t respond, he stands and walks over slowly to her, wondering if he can make out some clue to her mental state more clearly if he’s closer to her.

“No,” Quynh whispers when he’s hovering over her. “No. I’m angrier than I’ve ever been.”

Nicky laughs emptily. “Me too.” He sits on the bed as well and stares at the other wall. “I died.”

“Me too,” Quynh comments dryly. Nicky snorts at that. “I’ve been drowning since 1604.”

“You what?” Nausea curls in his throat; he remembers the painting in Joe’s studio, the painting that’s assuredly destroyed now. “My God -- are you … Andy’s wife?”

Quynh nods stiffly. “People did not wish for us to keep living when they discovered what we were. Witches, they called us. As if being able to suffer death innumerously was something to envy. Some sort of power, and not a curse.” She fiddles with a brass button on the cuff of her coat. “They put me in a metal coffin and sank me in the ocean.”

Her eyes are on the rain lashing at the window once again, and Nicky puts his hand between them slowly, his eyes on her face. “That’s horrific.” He blinks, shocked, as he realizes: “I was dreaming of you.” Quynh looks at him with a sad smile. “I drowned in my dreams every night, and I felt trapped -- oh my God, that was you.”

“It was.”

“But you’re free now.”

“Metal rusts.” Quynh shrugs and sighs through her nose. “I swam to the surface, and came to shore. Luckily a woman found me, and put me in clothes, told me where I was. She asked me where I needed to go and I said _Maine._ I needed to find you.”

“I don’t know where Andy is,” Nicky says gently, not wanting to upset her. “I don’t know where Jo--Yusuf is either -- his phone disconnected after he left me last fall, and … River, Nile I guess, her phone did too.” He shakes his head at himself because _how did he not fucking put together that River/Nile knew Joe/Yusuf?_

_Ugh._

“I know where they are,” Quynh counters, and Nicky stares at her, wide-eyed. “I wanted to find you, Nicky.”

“Why me?” He asks, almost aghast. “I’m … I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere, and I have … nothing, and you don’t even know me.”

“But I want to.” Quynh covers his hand with her own and squeezes gently. “You were alone, and I was alone. I thought we could be alone together.”

“You don’t want to be alone … with Andy?”

Again, she’s quiet for a long moment, lost in her thoughts. After what’s happened to her, Nicky’s shocked she can even form a full sentence, let alone carry on a conversation in a strange place with a total stranger amidst technology that would be beyond any seventeenth century reckoning.

 _But she’s thousands of years old,_ he remembers. _Four hundred years is a terrifyingly long time to drown -- incomprehensible. But Quynh has been alive for_ millenia. _She knows that things change, has seen it happen. She knows how to adapt._

Something at the back of his mind recoils at the knowledge that he might still be alive in 5000 or 6000, no matter what the world looks like then. It’s an utterly ghastly thought, and he wants to take a nap. He already wanted to take a nap.

_Everyone I’ve loved in the last two years was lying to me. And then I died. I have the right to take a fucking nap when I want to._

He’s so tired, but he also wants to cry. Or maybe eat french fries. Maybe both. All three at once would be great.

Next to him, Quynh stirs out of her own thoughts, still looking far, far away as she speaks. “I don’t think I want them to see me yet.” She taps her knee thoughtfully. “And you’ve met … all of them?”

“How many are there?”

“Nile, or River to you. Joe, or Yusuf. Andy, or Andromache,” Quynh lists. “And there’s the Frenchman, Sebastien. They call him Booker.”

“Joe talked about his friend Sebastien, but I …” Nicky thinks. “I can’t put a face to the name. Not really.”

“You must have met him, or you would see him in your sleep,” Quynh points out. “How funny, that you’d met them all before you died. That sort of thing simply wasn’t possible back when we were young.”

Nicky doesn’t bother saying that he’s never been able to imagine feeling this _old._ Seems like a glib thing to say to a woman who’s older than almost all civilizations currently on the planet.

“But, if it’s all the same to you,” Quynh continues, a little sidetracked by whatever thought is in her head, “I’d like to leave it as just us right now.”

“You know where Joe is?” 

Quynh studies him for a long moment before saying, “Yes.”

Nicky frowns as he tries to decide how he feels about that.

“I can tell you,” she says, “I just thought … we were both alone, and we both need _time,_ so … why not take the time together.”

“Won’t Booker and … and Nile,” he closes his eyes on the wrong-sounding name, “won’t they realize that you’re on land, with me?”

“Maybe.” Quynh shrugs. “But Andy’s not with them right now; she goes out looking for me now and then, and … well, I think you understand that _I_ don’t want to get a boat and head out on the sea to go look for her. I was hoping we could take some time, and … get to know each other before we …. Go and find them.”

She kicks her heeled boots along the floor before murmuring, “I’m so different now, Nicolo. You’re the one who has no idea who I was before. Andromache has told the other children about me,” _children?_ He thinks, confused, before he realizes she means him and Nile and Booker, “and they have me in their heads as something, and … and …”

“You don’t want them to see anything different,” he finishes for her when she stops talking.

Quynh nods.

“Alright.” Nicky nods and considers this; considers having an immortal friend around, one who might be a little unwell given the fact that she’s been tortured for centuries, one who knows the man he loves, the man he still can’t decide if he _wants_ to see, and knows him intimately well.

“What now?” Quynh asks, laughing a little when they’re both quiet for far too long.

“Psychotherapy?” Nicky suggests, only half-joking.

“I have no idea what that is,” Quynh laughs, “But it sounds awful.”

“It’s not too bad,” Nicky starts to chuckle though. “But it involves telling someone all your secrets, so … we’d probably have to kill them.”

“Probably.”

And it’s the way that Quynh _doesn’t_ sound like she’s joking that makes Nicky wheeze with laughter until his sides ache; it’s absolutely absurd to be sitting on a bed in the dark with a woman he just met, a woman with a story that he would have absolutely discounted even six months ago, but who he now feels an undeniable kinship with.

Nicky laughs and laughs and imagines rolling into therapy with a Starbucks latte and some stories about that time he fucking died and came back to life, _but also, hey doc, I still feel nervous when I have to order at the drive thru, and I still think a stale baguette with a piece of hard candy is a full meal when I’m sad._

Quynh laughs too, and neither of their laughs sounds precisely controlled or healthy, but it’s still laughter, and when it dies down, Nicky hears another very distinct noise.

A stomach growling.

“Are you hungry?”

She shrugs and looks around his cabin. “Yes, but I can wait until sunrise if you require light to hunt.”

Nicky considers this for a long moment and then leans down to dig around under his bed. He comes back up with a bright red bag that crinkles as he shows it off to Quynh.

“Door- it -ohs,” she pronounces, wrinkling her nose at him. “What is that?”

“This is about as much as I can hunt,” he explains, pulling the bag open.

He hands it to Quynh, who looks confused until she sniffs delicately. In that moment, Nicky wishes he could have social media accounts still because her face changes from impassively confused to absolutely delighted in two seconds; it would have made for an excellent video.

“What is that _smell_?” She gasps. “Did you make these?”

“Frito-Lay did.”

“Who?” Quynh’s already digging into the bag gleefully, and Nicky just shakes his head with a wry grin and doesn’t explain. A second later, a chip disappears into her mouth, and then Quynh _shrieks._

“Bad or good?” Nicky asks, worried that he’s somehow found a way to kill an immortal warrior with a shitty chip.

“Good!” Quynh eats another chip and then moans, sagging into herself with a toss of her hair. “Oh, they’re so _spicy._ ”

“I’ll get you a Coke,” Nicky promises, standing to grab one from his small mini-fridge.

Coke is almost as delightful of an experience as a Dorito, and soon Quynh is sighing contentedly, her arms wrapped around the bag of Doritos like it’s a teddy bear. “If I were a human,” she hiccups, “I would feel absolutely dreadful right now.”

“I certainly don’t miss stomach aches,” Nicky agrees with a grin. A thought occurs to him. “Do you … want to watch cartoons?”

Quynh’s eyes widen with great interest, and soon enough, they’re on his bed, Quynh gasping in delight when the Disney credits start to roll. Her finger prods at the screen of his ancient laptop, plugged into the wall outlet and absolutely burning his thighs as it wheezes with the effort of playing a downloaded movie.

“When I can get to Wi-Fi, I’ll show you Netflix,” Nicky promises.

Quynh drops her head to his shoulder and snuggles in, tapping at the screen still. “I have no idea what half of those words are.”

Nicky laughs, feeling lighter than he has in months, and they don’t talk for quite some time. In fact, they fall asleep like that, cuddled around his computer, absolute strangers who have been brought together by the most impossible circumstances. 

And honestly, Nicky doesn’t question it for a second. It’s been a terrible year, after all, and he has a feeling that meeting Quynh is the best thing that could have happened to him while he tries to figure out the impossible hand he’s been dealt.

In the following days, Nicky tries to figure out what to do with the knowledge that Joe was out there in the world, definitely missing him, definitely thinking him dead; a cold, unkind part of him thinks _Good, now he knows what he feels like to be left in the dark,_ but he regrets the thought immediately -- because he _loves_ Joe. He wants him to be okay; but he can see why Quynh doesn’t want to go find them yet either, not when everything is so fragile.

They’ll take it a day at a time, he decides as he starts to show Quynh around his little corner of the world. A day at a time, and then maybe one day he’ll figure out his way back to Yusuf. If he’s learned anything since November, it’s that he has plenty of time ahead of him. 

(He just wishes it didn’t feel so cruel to wait)

* * *

Nile sits bolt upright in the bed, coughing lightly as her head clears. Next to her, Booker stirs with a groan from where he sleeps on the floor.

“Booker,” she hisses, leaning down to poke his shoulder. “Booker!”

“No,” Booker swats at her hand and tries to adjust his neck a little. “Ow. No, I need more sl--”

“Book, I told you we could just share the bed--”

“--That would be improper, as you are a lady, and--”

“Jesus!” Nile smacks his shoulder, and Booker startles fully awake. “What did you dream of?”

“A cabin,” Booker answers, grumbling as he rubs his shoulder and sits up to stare at her through the moonlight. “Lots of trees. Maybe a book?”

“I saw Nicky.” Nile rubs her temples and tries to make sense of it. “I saw--”

“It’s been only a few months,” Booker says gently, reaching up to touch her bare calf, a tender look in his eyes. Nile scowls and looks stubbornly away, trying to piece it together. “It makes sense that you saw his face.”

“You didn’t?” Nile demands, looking back at him.

Booker sighs. “I don’t know what I saw.”

“I didn’t drown,” Nile realizes slowly. “I … I didn’t drown. Did you?”

He shakes his head slowly.

“Do you think that means --”

“I don’t know what it means,” Booker says gently. “And we won’t know more until we see more, and unless what we see matches up, we don’t even know if the dreams are real. You need to rest, Nile.”

“I can’t sleep.” She shakes her head and stares at the blankets. “I keep thinking … what if he’s alive? And somehow, Quynh …. Stopped drowning? Shouldn’t we go looking for them?”

“Andy’s out looking for her already,” Booker points out. “And we don’t know where the hell Joe went off to last week. He asked us for space. I am thinking it is not the best idea to bridge the gap by calling him five days after he leaves to say _we think perhaps your boyfriend is alive because one of us saw him for five seconds in a dream._ ”

Nile makes a face at that, and Booker sighs again, shaking his head. “Mon chou.”

“Don’t mon chou me.” Nile crosses her arms and looks away. “I just want it to make sense, Seb.”

“I know you do.” Booker leaves his hand on the bed, in case she wants to reach out to him in return.

After a few moments, she does, and their fingers tangle together. 

“We will make it make sense,” he promises clumsily. “We will. If we stay … together, we might have a better picture. And then we can tell Joe when he comes back, yes?”

Nile nods and squeezes his fingers. “Fine. But will you get up off the floor? You’re making my back hurt just looking at you, old man.”

“Old man.” Booker huffs but doesn’t look displeased at all. “This old man is still kicking, mon chou.”

“As long as you don’t kick in your sleep, I have no problem with sharing.” She scoots over demonstratively, and gestures at the warm, empty space she left behind. “We can stay ass to ass.”

Even in the moonlight, she doesn’t miss the way pink spills over in Booker’s cheeks as he stands. He clears his throat, and Nile snorts, rolling over and patting the space behind her again. “Come on. Chop chop.”

“No chopping, please,” Booker mutters as he slides in behind her. 

“Goodnight, Book,” Nile yawns, thrilled at having the warmth of someone behind her.

(She thinks of Nicky, of countless nights spent studying and writing, their feet tangled together under blankets as they stayed warm together -- this is like that and not like that because while Nile is thrilled with how cozy this feels, she doesn’t think Nicky ever looked at her, or any girl, the way Booker looks at her sometimes when he thinks she isn’t looking, and _now they’re sharing a bed_ and fuck this is messed up because she’s both misses Nicky so bad it’s a physical pain, and she’s also _horny as fuck_ because wow, Booker’s ass is pert when it brushes against hers, and _why did she think this was a good idea_ )

“Goodnight,” Booker responds a few seconds too late, his voice a little strangled.

She falls asleep smiling and doesn’t dream again.

* * *

James Copley looks up when he hears a distinctive thud on the deck of his houseboat. 

He pulls a gun from under the desk and stands slowly, watching the doorway and the window; sure enough, a shape crosses towards the door, moving slowly. Completely alone.

He swallows harshly and closes his eyes for a moment, lets himself think of his wife, her beautiful eyes, her hand limp in his as the heart monitor flatlined, thinks _I’ll be there soon, Angie,_ and then his door opens. 

“You should really lock that,” Joe Jones, aka Yusuf al-Kaysani comments, eyeing the door as it swings open and bangs into the wall.

“I have a feeling locks wouldn’t stop you for long, Mr. Jones.”

Joe stares at him, and while he certainly looks furious, he also looks … grieved. His laugh lines are gone, and his shoulders are drooped. For someone who isn’t supposed to age, he looks decades older, tragic in his beauty as he looks right through Copley.

“You have come to kill me, yes?” Copley drops the gun to his side, but it’s not as though Joe’s spared it a second glance. 

_That makes sense; what’s a bullet to an immortal warrior?_ Judging by the mess he heard about in DC, combined with the missions he knows their team’s completed, Joe wouldn’t be fazed by anything like a bullet. Copley ends up tossing the gun on the desk and rubs his neck instead.

“No weapon,” he notes when Joe only continues to stare at him. “With your hands then? Or perhaps in the ocean--”

“I came here because of Nicky,” Joe says, unbearable pain in his voice.

“Nicky?” Copley frowns, wondering if he missed news of an abduction. “I assure you, Mr. Jones, I do not have Nicolo Genova here--”

“No.” Yusuf trials his finger along the windowsill, walking further into the cabin, his eyes no longer on Copley. “Your man killed him.”

“I didn’t tell them to kill--” he splutters, “That was Merrick’s call, not mine, and his men as well--”

“You told them of us. After we helped you.” Joe’s gaze returns to his face, and it’s impenetrable. Terrifying. Copley wonders how many men have seen this expression before they died; he wonders if Joe always looks so damn _sad_ before he kills someone. “You sent them after us, and Nicky died.”

“Where is he now?” Copley glances at the door, worried that another immortal will come bursting through and make his death that much more unpleasant.

But Joe huffs a humorless laugh. 

“Dead.”

“But—“

“Nicky was mortal.” Joe’s face crumples, and his eyes are open wounds; the weight over him makes sense now, especially given how quickly Copley had recognized it. He knows this grief that swallows the man before him. It is the grief that only love can rip from you. “And _you_ killed him.”

“I didn’t know,” Copley closes his eyes for a second when Joe takes a step towards him, the closest to flinching since the uninvited arrival of his guest. “I swear to you, I thought -- I thought he was immortal--”

“Now you do know.” Joe drags a hand through his thick curls, and his voice rises sharply for the first time since he arrived, his finger jabbing at Copley. “He was the love of my life, and your actions ended his.”

“I’m sorry.” Copley hangs his head, wanting to apologize before the end, even if it changes nothing. “I didn’t … I only wanted to...” Deciding that Joe will never believe him, he stands up straight and looks al-Kaysani in the eyes. “Alright. Get on with it.”

“It?” Joe lifts an eyebrow, already composed again.

“Killing me.” Copley extends a hand awkwardly to the gun he’d tossed aside. “I think we both know there’s no chance in hell I can kill you, and … and I recognize why you want me dead. Not just the betrayal, but the death of … of Nicky.”

 _Twenty-eight,_ he realizes. Basically a kid. Sweet, smart, promising, well-liked. Who’d suffered through hell before he’d crossed any of their paths. Nicolo Genova, who could have been a priest; Nicolo Genova, who’d been loved by this man despite being … absolutely ordinary. The thought makes him sad, even if it’s mainly a borrowed sadness.

To his surprise, Joe shakes his head. “No. I just wanted you to live with it. The fact that you killed a good man.” He glances out the window at the sea. “And I wanted to see you. I wanted to feel the irony that you’re here, in his home land. And he’ll never see it again.”

“I wanted to bring him back home,” Joe whispers, as though he’s forgotten Copley can hear him. “But I couldn’t even find out where they’d buried him.”

“That was Merrick,” Copley explains, wondering if it’s the wrong thing to say. Joe turns his head to stare at him, and there’s something in his expression that suggests a man being led to execution. But, he doesn’t speak over Copley, nor does he move towards him in fury, so Copley continues. “Merrick’s secondary team arrived on site shortly after you departed. They pulled the tapes, so I was only able to see your team depart, and then nothing. They … set a fire, to clean up the evidence.”

He swallows. “I don’t have access to the agency’s resources anymore, so I couldn’t go digging in Merrick’s backyard; when I realized that they were going to … what they fully planned for you and your team, I decided I was better-off out here. Waiting for judgement. I had … I had no idea that Nicky was among the bodies they removed, so …”

He trails off at the full wince from Joe at the word _bodies._

A pained silence falls over them, and then Joe manages to say, “Don’t call him Nicky. You don’t … you haven’t earned that.”

Copley nods and eyes the door, remembering the tall woman and her axe. In that moment of distraction, Joe crosses the room and before Copley can even shout in alarm, Joe punches him in the face.

It stings like a fucking asshole, and Copley touches his cheek tenderly, finding it odd that he can even take the team to fully realize how badly that punch hurt. But Joe makes no move to hit him again.

Instead, he sways a little, moving with the boat as it rocks at its dock, and his eyes are back at the window again. 

“Do you know the last time Nicky was in Italy?” He asks, sounding like his full age for once, sounding like an ancient and terrible thing that’s as distant from the rest of humanity as another solar system’s sun.

“2005,” James answers, unsure if it’s a rhetorical question or not, but wanting him to hear it. “He … he was confirmed here, in a church not too far away, actually. He took the name … San Giuseppe as his patron saint.”

He’d found the essay Nicky had written, where he’d written with the casual intelligence of a precocious fourteen year old that there wasn’t ever anyone alive who knew how to love so unconditionally as Giuseppe, so perfectly, with absolute forgiveness and compassion. He’d wanted Giuseppe because he wanted to be able to love people as they were; he wanted to love his family and protect them, and who was better for that than Christ’s adopted father?

In that moment of recollection, Copley feels the full weight of remorse for what he’d done, and Joe’s punishment makes total sense. He’d let a good man die, and die horribly, a man whose childhood he’d studied and poked at and whose life he’d untangled in his efforts to solve a puzzle that wasn’t his to solve.

Joe looks at him for a long moment, and Copley withers in his gaze; then, Joe grips his arm, nods once, and says, “Thank you, James,” before turning and leaving without another word.

With shaking knees, Copley collapses in his chair, and buries his face in his hands.

* * *

Nicky peers over the stack of books he’s meant to be re-shelving and sees Quynh stabbing her fingers down into the keyboard of an old computer, looking less than amused by whatever she sees on the screen. He smiles at the now familiar sight of Quynh using modern tech (and hating every second of it), and then ducks down the aisle for 291.1-324, so he can put back a thick book on coup d’etats.

“It’s not an instruction manual,” Quynh had said crossly when she tossed it back at him near the circulation desk. “I do not know why I would want to see why _someone else’s_ had failed. I want to know how to make it better.”

“When I find Government Overthrow for Dummies, I’ll bring it right to you,” he’d promised, which only got a solemn nod from his friend before she went back to the computer to search up God-knows-what.

The FBI is most likely interested in whatever search queries are coming out of the tiny public library on Yellow Head, but Nicky hopes that there’s something more interesting for them to monitor than an immortal woman trying to catch up on four hundred years of bullshit.

“So many serial killers,” Quynh had muttered the last time he walked past her, so now he’s just staying on his side of the non-fiction aisles, shelving for Ralph, the local librarian whose joints are too stiff to do a lot of the legwork.

Once he’s done with his tasks, Nicky always settles in a large bay window at the eastern side of the library, staring out at the slate grey water while reading whatever book struck his fancy while he was shelving. Quynh usually curls up in an armchair with books of her own, but she’s much more interested in the computer and the endless information she can pull up with a few well-phrased questions.

(Teaching Quynh Google had been an _experience;_ he’ll never forget the mortifying conversation they’d had on _why_ you couldn’t just look up pornography in the middle of the library when a group of ninth graders was walking through for their research project)

After several hours in the library, they always find their way down to the water, Quynh getting closer and closer to the place where waves wash up on the rocky shore each day. Nicky’s asked her dozens of times if she really wants to be out there, and each time she nods firmly.

“If I ever want to see Andy, I’ll need to cross it,” she says the last time he asks her, and it makes such total sense among the confusion of his own thoughts that he immediately understands.

In late April, they sit only twenty feet from the ocean spray, Quynh wearing a red raincoat with her hair braided carefully into a crown; she’s perched on a flat rock, staring out at the sea and lost in her own thoughts as always. 

Nicky pulls at the woolen sleeves of his heavy sweater and tries to convince himself he finally feels the warmth of the sun cutting through the icy breeze off the water, but mostly he thinks that the rest of spring will be as dreary and grey as the start.

“Do you miss him?” Quynh says suddenly, breaking a nearly hour-long silence. 

He closes the journal he’d been scanning half-heartedly, scribbles of Joe’s left behind on the pages and looks over to her from his own seat on a fallen tree. There’s only the sound of gulls for a moment, the sound of tides rushing over land. With Quynh, there’s never a push to answer quickly -- she’s more than content to wait for an answer.

They’d been talking about Andy almost an hour ago, and it had caused her to retreat into the safety of her mind; Nicky assumes she’s made the leap from Andy to Joe, and then to the connection that lingers between Joe and himself. Thinking about Joe is still like prodding a fresh burn, so Nicky composes himself a little before answering, tucking the journal into his backpack before folding his hands.

“Every day.” He watches the way Quynh sits on her rock like a throne, and imagines a time when she probably ruled the world. 

With the deep red of her coat and her striking beauty against the grey backdrop, she’s almost otherworldly. Or, maybe she’s perfectly worldly, made more strongly of the stuff of earth than anyone alive, older than them all, wearing her age like a crown, her experience as her scepter. 

“Do you want to see him?” Quynh’s fingers twist together, which remains one of her few tells; that and the moments where she stares into nothing, her dark eyes empty with fear and grief. 

“Yes.” Nicky watches a fish slip between the waves before it vanishes. “No. I don’t … I don’t know.” He sighs deeply and wraps his arms around himself, leaning forward. “I miss him so much it hurts, but … he hurt me. And … and if this is going to be _forever,_ I want to know how I feel about everything before I see him again.”

“I don’t know how I feel about most things, Nicolo. Age is no guarantee of wisdom.” Quynh doesn’t say it unkindly, only thoughtfully. He knows her tones well enough by now to hear the gentleness in her voice. “And our lives are no guarantee of forever. Think of Lykon.”

It’s a wound that he can feel through her still-potent grief, even if he can’t even envision the man. Her lost brother; their proof that their immortality doesn’t last (something that terrifies Nicky so badly that he considers giving up his need to rest and heal and just going to find Joe immediately because _they don’t actually have forever_ )

Quynh continues, “If you are waiting for lightning to strike you so that you realize how to approach him at last … that might not happen.”

Nicky hums at this and nods, knowing that she’s telling him he’s being a coward, but also calling him a coward without any kind of judgement. 

He asks, wryly, “have you ever been struck by lightning?”

She turns to smirk at him, her eyes narrowed like a particularly beautiful bird of prey staring him down. “Curious? I think I could find some sort of metal, we could make you a hat and find out--”

“I think my curiosity would be better left unsatisfied,” he laughs, and Quynh smiles too, a distant sort of smile as her eyes slide back to the water. “...Do you want to see Andy?”

He thinks it might inspire another bout of silent contemplation, but Quynh answers immediately. 

“Yes. Every moment of every day, my soul cries out to hers.” A low-flying gull sings as if to emphasize her grief, echoing the throbbing of a wound that no one can see. “When they took me away, all I could think -- until I realized she was alive -- all I could think when I wasn’t so busy drowning was _don’t let her be down here, too._ ” Quynh wipes a tear from her cheek and flicks it between her fingers. “It wasn’t until Booker was reborn that I realized she was … free.”

Nicky swallows harshly. “I’m so sorry, Quynh.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be angry, but don’t waste your time being sorry.” Quynh tucks her hands back into her pockets and once again becomes lost to her thoughts. 

After the sun has slipped back through the clouds behind them, scattering light across the dull surface and catching on the froths of white that cap errant waves, Quynh tells him, “As much as I miss her, I like getting my bearings here. When I think of Andromache, and all the time that was stolen from us, all the time that I spent down _there …_ I feel wild. Angry. Scared. But, you … You … you make me feel stable, Nicky.”

He blinks back tears and assures her in a thick voice, “It’s the same for me, Quynh.”

She said it better than he could; no matter how badly he wants to see Joe again, to let him know that he’s okay, to end his grief -- it’s all still so terrifying, and Nicky has terrible days still. Not as bad as Quynh, his night terrors not nearly as violent (she’d stabbed him once, and he was weirdly glad that she’s not one for apologies because mostly he’d just wanted to go back to sleep after), but Nicky does get lost in his own anger sometimes, his own fear, his own disconnect to the rest of the world.

Quynh doesn’t expect anything from him, other than questions on how to restart the computer when she forgets, or a person to talk to when she journeys out of her past that traps her in her head, or a warm presence to snuggle into when they go to sleep at night. Their relationship, as bizarre and unlikely as it is, doesn’t have the _complications_ that Nicky knows will catch up to them when they go and find the rest of the immortal people

“If I were interested in cocks,” Quynh says, “I’d like your cock, Nicolo Genova.”

He bursts out laughing at the absurdity of the comment, but when she looks at him expectantly, amusement playing at the corners of her full mouth, he assures her, “It’s the same for you and your … lady parts.”

Quynh scoffs and within a split second, hurls a rock near her foot up at his head. He barely swats it out of the way in time, but then they both laugh at each other, and the next silence is not nearly so mournful.

“I hate the ocean,” Quynh decides when they turn away from the water and head up the path towards their cabin.

“Me too,” Nicky agrees, slinging his backpack over his shoulders and accepting the hand she holds out to him. “I drowned once, when I was a child. It was awful.”

“Tell me about it.” Quynh swings their hand back and forth and skips over a small crack on the road. “I drowned over a million times.”

“Alright.” Nicky squeezes her hand. “You win.”

It’s not funny, but they both laugh anyway, appreciating the irony of the place they’ve chosen to temporarily settle in, the place that’s giving them room to heal, so close to a thing that’s hurt them so badly.

There’s a poetry there, Nicky thinks, but he doesn’t like to squint for too long at the way it rhymes.

* * *

“What a clusterfuck,” Nile mutters, tossing an empty cartridge and checking her gun. “Clear, by the way.”

Joe comes around the corner, blood splattered along his cheekbone and down along his neck towards his body armor. She can see half a dozen bullet holes tattered through his shirt. 

“All that work, and that asshole isn’t even here.” He shrugs and sheaths his saif, tucks his gun into its holster again. “Good thing Andy isn’t here.”

“Good thing.” Booker limps out of a sideroom, holding a flashdrive up for them to see. “Not a total waste, though. I can probably find where his next shipments are coming from. I planted a little surprise on their network.”

“You’re a peach, Seb,” Nile says warmly.

It’s a sign of how disinterested in everything Joe is that he doesn’t even blink at the pet name.

They climb into the car nearly half a mile away from the now-burning warehouse of the sex trafficking group they were _supposed_ to bring down cleanly today, and Joe’s fingers grip the bar above his head stiffly, his eyes distant while they pull through the darkened city.

Sirens scream as emergency vehicles flash past them on the road, heading towards the fire they’d left behind. Nile watches them through the back window and then settles into her seat, glancing at Booker in the rearview.

He gives her the tiniest, most imperceptible headshake, but she ignores it.

“Hey, Joe,” Nile says casually. “I’ve … I’ve got a potential update for you.”

“Oh?” He barely blinks at that. 

He makes no effort to guess, not even a _you two are finally sleeping together?_ Which they _aren’t_ doing, but at least it would sound like the normal, teasing, sweet Joe for him to at least try to joke with them.

“I don’t think Quynh is drowning anymore.”

Booker coughs supsiciously from the front seat, but it works; Joe looks over at her, and it’s like it’s the first time he’s really seen her since he got back from wherever-the-fuck-he-was-for-two-months. 

“Where?” He demands, locked onto her fully. “Where is she?”

“All _we_ can see,” Nile is purposeful to include Booker, although she knows he will drink multiple shots of whiskey and whine at her in French later tonight for this, “is the water. Maybe the Atlantic? Rocky shores.”

Booker nods when Joe leans forward to stare at him for confirmation, and he settles back, whistling low and quiet, eyes wide with wonder. He doesn’t look crushingly depressed now, which Nile counts as a sort-of win, even if that win comes at the expense of ripping off a half-millenium old bandaid. 

“Does Andy --”

“No.” Nile shakes her head. “We haven’t been able to get into contact with her.”

“Quynh shouldn’t be alone,” Joe mutters, rubbing a hand along his smooth jaw now.

(Andy had made him shave his beard when they went on the run; Nile changed her hair and now wears it naturally, and Booker dyed his locks darker, and Andy went blonde and has been growing it out. It’s a wildly different look for all of them, honestly)

“That’s the thing,” Nile says. “She isn’t.”

“No?” Joe glances over again, concern written over her face. “Tell me she has not been abducted _again._ We need to go, we need to find her--”

“She is with one man, who means her no ill will,” Booker says, cutting off Nile quickly. “And _we_ ,” he leans into the word, and Nile scowls at him, “cannot get a good look at his face. He is shaped like a friend, though.”

“Alright.” Joe considers this for a moment and nods. “Alright. But, when Andy gets back, we will have to go and look for her. It would be cruel to keep them apart.”

“Right.” Booker doesn’t argue, but Nile sort of wants to; Joe looks out the dark window though, his shoulders slumping again, and she bites her tongue to stop from saying more.

Once they’re back at a safehouse, nearly two hundred miles later, Nile slams the door shut and stands, scowling up at Booker while Joe walks up to the front door slowly, his head tilted back to the moon for a long moment before he disappears inside. 

“Why didn’t you tell him that I thought it was Nicky?” Nile hisses, poking at Booker’s burly arm.

“Because you _think_ it’s Nicky.” Booker rubs at the spot she’d jabbed with an affected, “Ow.”

She pokes him again. “I’m at least sixty percent sure---”

“That’s a forty percent chance that you get our Joe’s hopes up to the point where he would be more obliterated than before if you are wrong,” Booker reminds her gently, and she huffs and looks away, pissed that he’s absolutely right. “Nile. Mon chou. Look at me.”

She does, begrudgingly. 

“I believe that you love Nicky very much, and I … cannot tell you how often I have dreamt of faces that I long to see again,” Booker touches her cheek gently. “But when I wake and they are not with me … that pain, Nile. It is agony. All I see now are waves, the color red, and trees. The moment I see him too, I will tell you, and we can let Joe know. But ... “

He sighs and retracts his hand slowly. “...I worry that your mind plays tricks on you. You cannot wish a person alive. Not when our affliction is so rare.”

“Affliction.” Nile snorts and scuffs her feet on the dirt road before looking up at Sebastien through the darkness. “You still think this is a curse then.”

His gaze is steady in return. “Not entirely, no. When I am with you, it is a blessing.” He takes her hand and kisses her fingers gently, and Nile’s breath catches in her throat. “We would never have met in my first life.”

“No, we wouldn’t have,” she agrees, blinking in shock at the easy affection. Booker drops her hand and tilts his head at her in a little bow before tucking his hands in his pockets and strolling up to the house.

“Hey!” She hisses at his back. “Hey! I’m still … sort of pissed at you!”

“Sort of pissed I can handle,” is her cocky answer, accompanied by a half-wave over his shoulder.

“Asshole,” Nile mutters, before following him up the path.

* * *

Nicky dies for the second time on a very innocuous afternoon in May. 

He’s out walking with Sammy when they come across a moose; Sammy is delighted, of course, but Nicky can’t help but see how the thing is bigger than any fucking SUV he’s ever seen, bordering on the tank-sized. And, he can’t help but notice how the thing is lowering its giant head at them and pawing at the ground as Sammy tries to take a photo of it.

“Sammy,” Nicky says as calmly as he can, “I think you should run up the hill and get behind a tree.”

“What?” Sammy takes a photo with the flash and noise on. “Oh, shit.”

The moose bellows, and Nicky doesn’t think, only shoves Sammy hard out of the path of the moose, inadvertently taking her place. A second later, an absolutely _crushing_ pain envelops him, and he soars through the air before landing on his neck so badly that his last thought before he dies is _oh fuck, this looks so stupid._

He wakes up with an awful headache, his head at a weird angle as he hears Sammy sobbing above him. Something in his neck cracks, and then his back, and he groans, sitting up with the distinct feeling of congealing blood all along his neck and forehead; Sammy screams and startles when he sits up.

“Ew,” he mutters, flinging some bloody mud off his hands. Then, he sees Sammy staring at him in abject shock, and he says, “Um. I can … explain.”

“Explain?” Sammy leaps to her feet, and Nicky stands slowly, hands extended, remembering that _this is how Quynh ended up at the bottom of the ocean,_ and, _oh shit._ “I know exactly what’s going on!”

“You do?” Nicky asks warily, wondering if he starts running, will Sammy even want to follow him. He probably has enough time to get to the cabin and grab his stuff.

“You’re a superhero!” Sammy beams at him, which is not the violent, accusatory reaction he’d expected when she watched his body get glued back together by invisible hands. “That makes _total_ sense!”

“Uh.” Nicky rubs his neck and looks around. “If that moose is still here--”

“It got bored when you weren’t moving anymore and walked away.” Sammy shrugs. “Then I came back out from the ditch you pushed me in -- ow, by the way -- and came over here, but you came back to life! That’s so fucking cool!”

“Sure.” Nicky winces as a final vertebrae pops, and then glances at Sammy bashfully. “I … only Quynh knows about this.”

“Ohhh!” Sammy fist pumps. “Oh my God, she’s your partner in crime! That makes total sense. Lesbian-Gay solidarity, but make it superheroes!”

“That’s not quite--” Nicky frowns. “How did you know Quynh was a lesbian?”

Sammy puts her hands on her hips and lifts her eyebrows, clearly saying _duh,_ and Nicky snorts and nods. 

“Right. Right, um, look, I hate saying this, and …” He coughs nervously, his heart in his throat from the shock of dying and also the sheer hell of someone seeing him come back to life, “and if a person older than you _normally_ says this, you should … absolutely tell someone, but … do you think … this could be between us?”

Sammy stares at him before nodding quickly. “Fuck yes! I would never, ever tell anyone, oh my _God,_ Nicky, do you have a superhero name?”

Their walk back to the campground is peppered with questions like that, and Nicky tries to laughingly respond to all of them, but he’s still a nervous wreck. He’s relieved when Sammy heads inside to start her math homework, and he takes a turn down towards the beach, needing to sit alone with his thoughts for a few minutes. Or hours.

It’s official, he has to admit to himself as he settles on the rocks. He’s immortal. Can’t die, can’t stay wounded. 

_Fucking fuck._

“What’s happening to me,” he whispers, as if it’s a present tense thing, and not an already-done-for-quite-some-time sort of thing. Nicky wraps his arms around his knees and rests his forehead on his arms, moaning wordlessly as he rocks back and forth. 

_Superhero._ He laughs at the word. How the fuck is he supposed to be a hero?

He couldn’t cut it as a priest. Or a student. Or a boyfriend. So, a hero?

“What am I?” Nicky whispers, lifting his head to stare at the water.

He rests his chin on his arm, nestling into the fabric of his sweatshirt. There, he lets his mind wander, not pushing too hard into a single thought, not trying to answer a single question, until he realizes the painful undercurrent to every single one of his thoughts:

Nicky wants to talk to Joe.

He wants to pick his brain. He wants to see how he handled this. He wants him to hold him, really fucking hold him, and he wants Joe to kiss him, and to see how much he’s cried over this, and to kiss each tear. He wants to hold Joe, and he doesn’t want him to be sad over a person who isn’t really dead -- who can’t fucking die at all -- and he wants this to be fixed. 

_God_. God fucking damnit, Nicky misses Joe. He sees him in the glint of sun off the water, imagining the way light always caught in his beautiful eyes. He hears his voice sometimes when he sits with old records and lets them play through to the end, and in the white noise he can see clearly a place where they only hold each other, and nothing bad ever happened. When he sleeps -- God, when Nicky sleeps, he can feel Joe’s arms around him, a welcome phantom that has crawled so deep into his consciousness that he isn’t sure where longing for Joe stops and his own identity starts.

He wants to be with him. He misses him. He’s still so angry at him. He loves him. Irreparably. Unendingly. Messily. 

Nicky loves Joe Jones, the art professor. The liar. The illusion.

He also loves Yusuf al-Kaysani, the warrior. The poet. The reality.

Here at the edge of the world, staring out into the waves as the salted spray falls over his face like a baptismal font, mingling with the tears he’s shed countless times over one man and the life they’d lost, Nicky’s starting to realize how he actually can love them both. He’s starting to realize how those people blur together, the magnitudes inside Joe, inside Yusuf. His love contains multitudes, so of course the man he loves does too. 

* * *

(When he tells Quynh later that evening _how_ he died, she laughs so hard that she chokes on a Dorito, which he thinks is only fair)

* * *

Joe watches the sun set over the Atlantic; they’re still in Cedeira after the last job, waiting for Andy to come back. His thoughts often stray to Quynh and the news Nile had given him, but mostly his thoughts are selfishly centered on his recent loss.

He has no doubts Quynh will find her way back to them; he eagerly awaits her return, and when he’d left Booker and Nile behind that night, he’d cried in the privacy of his room, cried for hours for his lost sister who he still loved so dearly. But there was _hope_ there now, hope and the ability to wait for her to find them.

There is still a chance she could find them, after all; and there is someone who Joe will never see again.

He spends the last light of each day committing pieces of Nicolo Genova to paper. He’s captured the swoop of his beautiful nose, the light of his expressive eyes. He’s written poems about his beauty, his kindness; he’s written essays on the way his hand felt in his. Sometimes, when he feels adrift in his grief, he allows himself to write stories where their epilogue was so much happier.

Epilogues where they sail into the sunset together, hands clasped and eyes on the horizon. Only them, forever. Epilogues with wedding rings and villas and grey in Joe’s hair as he ages alongside the man he loved and loves and will love.

Instead, their epilogue offers no softness, no catharsis. It is a slowly unwinding story of one man, sitting by himself on a lonely beach, drawing scraps of a man too large to ever be properly written or drawn. His Nico.

His sweet, beloved Nicky.

That night in early May, Joe pulls from the mind he’d possessed centuries ago. When Yusuf al-Kaysani was still young, or at least what he remembers _young_ feeling like.

(He’d remembered it so clearly in Nicolo’s arms; he’d remembered the bursting lightness of youth, the excitement to see the world, the desire to inhabit it and to grip it and to make it his)

Joe remembers what it was like to sit out on a beach, in what would later be called Italy; he remembers thinking of what love would feel like when he finally found it. How carefully he had spelled out the feeling that he only could grasp the edges of; how deeply he’d longed for that connection to another’s soul. 

And he had found it, that love that wound so far into himself that Joe isn’t sure if he can accurately recall a time when he didn’t love Nicolo. Looking at this poem, this wonderful poem that had brought Nicolo to his office (and _doomed him,_ he thinks darkly before pushing it away, not wanting to be lost to his guilt tonight), this poem that had connected them over improbable centuries … Joe realizes that he actually always has loved Nicolo Genova.

He was only waiting for him to arrive.

So, in the dying light, he finishes this poem to his love, the words crawling from his pen in a language so old that he is the last person alive who could translate it anymore -- a blessing, considering this poem was only ever meant for Nicolo.

_Oh, how the sun loves the moon, / and wishes to kiss the back of his neck / at the cusp of dawn./ His heart is a fountain that I long to drink from / It is not water that he offers me, / But kindness in an unkind world. / My love has a kiss that thrills me, / His body awakens a passion in me / That I knew not of before his touch._

_The sleeping beams of light shed like tears / Strewn across the pillows. / My heart is gone. / His beauty, lined in patient silver / Lost to the world / His heart is stopped. / And all of time weeps for it._

_The fountains run dry. / My pillow lies cold. / Lips know nothing of kisses. / There are no museums to fill with his beauty. / There are no more poems to write. / Time is the thief of our joy. / But minutes were our only blessing._

_I stand in the window and count / Each day that passes, count each beam / of light, which once shone from his eyes / And now only shines from the moon / Distant, far, cold._

_What is the sun with no moon? / What is a day with no night? / Oh, how the sun loves the moon / Oh, he’ll never see him again._

_My heart is gone._

* * *

A few weeks after the moose attack, Quynh surprises Nicky when he returns from the library.

She’s standing over a packed suitcase, a sleek thing she’d found at Goodwill; in her hands is a small manila envelope.

“What’s that?” He asks, setting his stack of books on the desk.

“My passport.” Quynh pulls a blue book from the envelope and waves it around.

“How the hell did you get that with no Social Security Number?” 

“Dark web.” Quynh shrugs, and Nicky feels his eyes bug out of his head.

“You -- what? From the -- library computer? Y-you--”

“You left me alone with that computer for a long time, Nicolo, of course I learned some tricks.” Quynh scoffs and tucks her passport away again. “Anyway, I need one if I’m to travel to Spain.”

“Spain?” He echoes, feeling terribly lost.

“Mhm. I gathered enough clues from my dreams, and … and I think it’s time. Andromache is coming home; now, it’s my turn.”

“Oh.” Nicky clears his throat. “Is … is Joe with them?”

Quynh eyes him a little as she checks a compartment of her suitcase. “He’s harder to read. Andromache is always there, but … he’s at the fringes. Like something is keeping him away. I think he’s too grieved to spend much time with them.”

Nicky nods, and Quynh glances at him again. “None of us are meant to be alone, Nicolo. We’re family. I think of you as family.”

He nods again. “I feel the same way.”

“Good.” Quynh pulls his duffel bag out from underneath the bed and tosses it on the quilt. “Then pack.”

“I--” His stomach clenches, and he coughs a little. “I …”

“It’s your decision, of course,” Quynh assures him. “But I had a different passport made for you, and I already bought you a ticket.”

“How did you get the money too--” she shoots him a loaded glance, and Nicky nods and clears his throat. “Right. Dark … web.”

“Dark web,” Quynh repeats cheerfully. “So. Think about it, and then tomorrow, tell me if--”

Nicky crosses the room and grabs his sweater, tucking it into the duffel bag, and Quynh smiles at him as he starts to pack in earnest.

“I’m tired of being frozen,” he says, fishing out his last clean pair of socks. “I want … I want to feel alive again, even if I have to keep fucking dying to do that.”

Quynh pats his arm. “That’s the spirit.” Then, she hands him his headphones, and they smile at each other once more before zipping their suitcases at the same time.

* * *

Andy isn’t even home long enough for them to find a way to tell her about Quynh when the world tips on its side.

She’s asleep on the couch, curled up with her head on the arm of the sofa when they come back from the market with shopping bags full. She’s sleeping as Booker makes a messy paella, her nose twitching a little as the delicious smells waft up from the kitchen.

Nile keeps shooting Joe meaningful looks, and he has no idea what to do with that; he also feels like he met his quota of socialization for the day, so he heads to his room to grab his journal, intending to get a head start on his writing this evening.

Then: the knock.

Booker curses loudly enough for Joe to hear it from the back of the house, and Joe dives for his gun, pulling it out from under the pillow and checking it quickly. He sweeps to the front of the house, and he can see Andy up, her hand on her labrys; he sees Nile at the door, and Booker behind her, his gun pointed at a spot guaranteed to be a torso or a neck or a head on whoever’s behind that door.

The door opens, and Andy makes a noise he’s never heard from her: a gasp, maybe a scream, but her labrys clatters to the ground as she runs forward.

Joe walks into the living room in time to fully take in the sight of Quynh in Andy’s arms, both of them locked together, kissing and sobbing and mostly embracing, and Nile and Booker watching with clear delight, and mild whiplash.

“I almost shot you!” Booker says, tucking his gun into his waistband. 

“What a wonderful way to meet someone,” Quynh says. So, her sense of humor is still as fucked up as ever, and Joe snorts a little at it.

She looks up and sees him there, and there is something downright _mischievous_ about her smile. “Hey, little brother,” she greets him in Arabic, holding a hand out to him behind Andy’s back. She doesn’t relinquish her hold on Andromache, who’s still sobbing audibly, terrifying, wracking cries that feel like they aren’t even coming from her. 

Joe crosses the room to take Quynh’s hand, and then gives up and wraps his arms around both women, crying a little as Quynh nuzzles into his bare cheek. “I miss the beard,” she complains. 

“Tell me about it.” Joe laughs and then smiles at Nile and Booker. “You two were right.”

“What do you mean, they were ri-ri-right?” Andy sniffles, and Booker whistles a little and looks away, squinting at some art of the wall. “Huh? Nile, explain--”

“Before all that, I think there’s someone you still need to introduce me to!” Quynh steps out of Andy’s arms and tucks loose strands of hair behind her ears. She rubs her hands together, absolutely gleeful. “I believe there’s a tall, handsome man I need to meet.”

“Oh?” Andy lifts an eyebrow, confused.

“Yes, my new little brother!”

“Uh…” Booker raises his hand awkwardly. “Is that me?”

“No, no, I know you,” Quynh waves a hand at him dismissively. “Sebastien le Livre, died with Napoleon, drinking problem, obsessed with Nile, blah blah blah. Old news.” She grabs Andy’s hands and grins at her, another semi-evil grin that’s directed at Joe a second later. “No, my _newest_ brother. The sexy Italian one, the one with the cute accent?”

Joe thinks maybe she’s buried her sword in his stomach, or picked up Andy’s labrys to finish it. He makes a wounded noise, and they all stare at her in confusion -- _did she see him through Nile?_ He wonders, tears building in his eyes. _She thought he was one of us because we involved ourselves in his life. I’m not strong enough to explain to her --_

Then, Quynh laughs and claps her hands. “Okay, that was _totally_ worth it -- don’t worry, I brought something to our little party. A gift, so to speak. Nicky!” She sings, and Joe’s eye twitches, and he wonders for a wild moment if she’s gone insane after being tortured for so long. “Nicky, sweetheart, come on!”

There’s the sound of footsteps outside the still open door, and Booker’s hand strays to his gun; but Nile grips his arm, her other hand at her heart as she gasps loudly. 

“Oh putain,” Booker mutters, his hand going to anchor Nile at his side.

It’s him: his hair long and tied back in a half-bun, his jaw covered in scruff, green-grey eyes exhausted. Beautiful, breathing. Here.

“Nicolo.” Joe walks forward in a trance, unable to breathe. “Nicolo?”

He’s dreaming. He must be dreaming. This is his cruellest dream of the last year, a horrible trick, and Joe never wants to wake up -- he wants to live here forever in this illusion where he is close enough to touch his Nico one last time.

Then, Nicolo smiles at him, a crooked thing not even Yusuf’s imagination could create so beautifully.

“Hello.” He clears his throat. “Sorry, Quynh thought … she thought it would be funny.”

“It _was_ funny,” Quynh mutters mutinously from behind Joe.

“You’re here,” Joe says, studying Nicky’s face, his strong jaw, his sharp nose, his perfect eyes, the little scar over his cheekbone that’s still there, and … “You’re alive.”

“Can’t seem to die,” Nicky admits, blushing a little, and Joe makes a choked noise that was probably meant to be a laugh at its origin. 

But then he’s sobbing, really sobbing, horrible wracking tears that burst from his chest; Nicky crosses the room in three strides, his arms open, and Joe hurls himself into it. They crash together, and it’s _him,_ he’s here, Nicky’s here, breathing and real and warm under his palms. Joe grabs the back of his neck, the tops of his shoulder blades, his sides, before sinking one hand into his hair, and holding him tight to his body with his other arm.

Nicky holds him steady the whole time, and Joe’s aware of Nile crying, and Quynh making some kind of a joke, but it becomes white noise against the only important sound in the universe, the sound he hears when he kisses along Nicky’s jaw, kisses his perfect ear, and then presses his ear to the column of his throat:

Nicolo Genova’s heart still beats; and now, it feels like Yusuf’s does again, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
> 
> AHHHHH!!! Did that satisfy your need for a reunion? Did I make you/them wait long enough !?!? Tell me all your feelings, even if you just scream into the void of a comment box <3 Thank you thank you for helping me to keep going as I pushed out this last angsty chapter.
> 
> The next chapter !?!? Why, it's full of smut and love confessions and maybe some plot-ish if we feel like it. Let me know your thoughts/feelings/things you'd LOVE to see in the last chapter (know that I already have a rough idea of what's going in it//the setting is already picked).
> 
> (Also, hey, remember that time that when I first sat down to write this fic, I really intended for Nicky to die of old age with Yusuf at his side? Remember when I planned that ?? *Nervous laughter at myself and how sad I made myself before I even wrote this thing*)


	11. the clocks had ceased their chiming/and the deep river ran on

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The family gets some downtime, away from missions (and Joe and Nicky make the most of it)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO and sorry to make you wait a whole week for the epilogue!!! At least it wasn't a cliffhanger (not that it probably made it any shorter of a break), and I really hope you are all still interested in this little 'verse. Basically, my cat threw my computer off my desk and into a metal grate (there's gouge marks in it now!) so it didn't work for almost four days, and then I was very depressed/anxious (ah, life) and given that this is a happy chapter, I wanted to be in a better head space to write it so I could give these boys (and you all!) the epilogue you deserve.
> 
> ANYWAY!  
>  **Warnings**  
>  Mild angst/references to past violence  
> Smut smut smutty smut consensual smut -- anal fingering/sex, manual stimulation, implied rimjob  
> (you'll see the sex scene coming from pretty far away if you wanna skip the most explicit part, stop at "shivering with happiness", and it ends at the next line/page break)  
> I REALLY HOPE YOU LIKE THE ENDING

“And then, he was killed by a moose,” Quynh says breezily, laughing at the grumpy noise it draws from Nicky. 

Joe’s fingers tighten compulsively around Nicky’s wrist, which he’s been holding onto for most of Quynh’s story of how the two met; he knows that he's the only one who doesn’t look slightly amused by the tale of Nicky’s death. “He  _ what _ ?”

“Fine now,” Nicky murmurs with a smile. “Not my first head wound, probably not the last.”

Nicky means it as a joke -- Joe knows this. He knows that it’s offered lightly, that Nicky wants to soothe, to diminish.

He stiffens anyway and drops Nicky’s wrist, folding in on himself on the couch. Nicky watches him with concern, and looks as though he’ll reach out to pull Joe back. Something flickers in his eyes though; his jaw sets. He looks away, back at Quynh, who’s excitedly telling them about the joys of the internet and all of the ‘friends’ she’s made in the dark, or something to that effect.

Joe loses the shape of the story and stares into space, a tic building in his jaw from how hard he clenches it.

There’s something heavy in his gut, a weariness he didn’t expect. He thinks it might be the fact that he hasn’t had a chance to speak to Nicky privately this whole time -- he doesn’t begrudge the time with Quynh. The sight of his sister feels like a warm ray of sunlight across his face. But, the reports from Nile and Booker had at least  _ prepared  _ Joe for the reality of seeing Quynh, weeks ago. 

(They hadn’t mentioned Nicky; Joe keeps circling back to that fact, over and over again. They hadn’t mentioned Nicky, but here’s Quynh, talking about the  _ months  _ she spent with Nicky, almost a  _ third  _ of the time that  _ he  _ got with Nicky, the familiarity that’s blossomed between them both beautiful and painful to behold because Nicky has  _ changed  _ since that horrible day where Joe thought he was dead. Changed into someone calmer, less anxious, strangely ancient, strangely whole for the pain suggested by Quynh’s light-hearted story. Changed to fill spaces in Quynh’s life as she filled spaces in his, changed into something otherworldly -- Nicolo has come back from the grave, a miracle that Yusuf will be grateful for until the end of time, but perhaps he is no longer  _ his  _ Nicky. Perhaps he never was. And he hates himself for the selfishness of that thought)

“If you two were together for so long,” Andy says thoughtfully, tangled around Quynh in the overstuffed armchair, “why didn’t one of you two notice?” She gestures at Nile and Booker, who are sprawled out on the floor between the armchair and the couch, sitting on cushions.

Nile cracks her neck a little before shooting a side-glare at Booker, who holds up his hands with a sheepish grin, directed at Nicky and Joe. “I encouraged Nile to refrain from … what seemed like an unlikely hope. She thought it was you--”

“--And Book told me that it would kill Joe permanently if I was wrong.” Nile pats Nicky’s shin with a heavy sigh. “But nope. You’re real. And you,” she directs at Booker, “owe me  _ at least  _ eight hundred euros.”

“Eight hundred?” Quynh asks, fascinated. “Such a lot of money--”

“--Booker bets worse, every weekend--”

“I did not think inflation had gotten that bad.” Quynh hums and taps a finger against her chin before smiling a kiss into Andy’s jaw. “When the tickets for our journey were thousands of dollars, I presumed that it was a rarity.”

“Nope. Just airlines, being a bag of dicks,” Nile assures her, and Nicky’s mouth twitches into a smile. 

Nile returns the expression, but she looks away after a second, heavy with guilt. “Nicky,” she says, clearing her throat and touching his knee again. “I--”

“Whatever maudlin apology you all need to give this kid, it can wait until morning,” Andy reports, sitting up a little but barely dislodging the woman draped over her. “I don’t feel like watching anyone cry tonight.”

“You cried for fifteen minutes, boss,” Booker points out.

Quynh giggles a little, sharp but unfocused, but Andy only jabs her chin at Nicky, who’s definitely drooping. “He’s about to pass out. Let him sleep, and then bother him with your emotions.”

“Thank you,” Nicky mumbles, wiping at his eyes. 

He stands, and Joe’s heart cracks a little when he offers Quynh the first hug; he watches pain and grief and regret in Nile’s face when she gets the second hug, a little more tentative than his first. 

Andy cups the back of Nicky’s neck and stares him in the face for a solid five seconds before giving him an incredibly rare, full smile, patting him on the shoulder before returning her full attention to Quynh -- Booker gets a friendly handshake, and then he and Nile disappear to the back bedroom, arms linked. Nile looks back for a long second, but it’s Joe she looks at, not Nicky.

_ You okay?  _ She mouths at Joe. 

He nods, once, even though it feels like a lie.

It’s just him and Nicky now.

Nicky must have not have changed entirely in his transformation to immortality because he bends down and starts picking up loose cups, stacking them into each other and avoiding Joe’s eyes.

“You don’t have to do that,” Joe assures him. “We can pick up in the morning--”

“We won’t have to if we pick up now,” Nicky points out, his hands shaking a little as he walks to the kitchen, his back to Joe.

Nicky was always the messy one.

The thought leaves him feeling hollowed out in the middle of the living room, his heart beating at an unfair rate in his chest. Everything he wants to say feels ready to explode out of him, but the problem is that Joe has  _ no idea  _ what he wants to say to the man he loves more than anything in the universe, this revenant who’d wandered back into the stream of his life with shaggy hair and far too much scruff, but with the eyes and ears and lips and shoulders of the man he loves.

(This is how Nicky must have felt when he woke up, Joe realizes. He must have seen beyond the man Yusuf had pretended to be, and realized that things were beyond his reckoning. The only difference is Joe had chosen to lie to Nicky; Nicky has merely developed into someone that Joe only knows the edges of, someone he’s afraid won’t need him in the slightest. How he  _ hates  _ the thought of it, the possibility)

Then, Nicky’s in front of him, quiet as he studies Joe.

“You shaved,” he murmurs, his hand lifting from where it’s cradled to his chest; he seems to think twice and snatches it back before it can touch Joe’s jaw, and Joe feels a blade of ice carving a burning path through his chest.

He nods, wordlessly. Then: “You didn’t.”

His voice sounds hoarse, weak, even to his own ears; Nicky stares at him still, those eerily clear eyes unblinking. Joe’s been confronted with the largest of all miracles tonight, the miracle of Nicolo’s resurrection, his immortality, but he’s granted another miracle.

Nicky smiles. An unimaginable sunrise; warmth as he shivers in cold.

And then one more miracle:

He takes his hand.

* * *

Booker traces unknown patterns across the fine skin stretched over Nile Freeman’s knuckles. 

They’re facing each other in a too-small bed that creaks ridiculously when one of them shifts. But neither of them are moving, only facing each other. She’s smiling, and it feels like a thousand things he doesn’t deserve. She’s smiling, and of course he has to question it, even if it is not a defeated sort of questioning.

One hand reaches up, a finger extended to trace the edges of her perfect smile, the sweet scrunch of her nose that shows how happy she is. “What is it?” 

“I know I have a lot to talk to … to Nicky about,” she begins, squeezing his hand and sliding a little closer so their knees knock together. “But it’s nice to have everyone under the same roof.”

Nile Freeman is a saint: other than her glaring commentary in the living room, she has not yet said  _ I told you so.  _ Because she is happy, Booker realizes, and Nile Freeman could never be cruel in her happiness.

“Feels like a full house,” she continues, eyes fixed on where their fingers blend together. “...A family.”

They are, with the exception of their new member, the only two of their group who remember the weight of that word. The cost of it. The grief of it. The joy, the intangible preciousness.

Booker has had grief carved from his ribs over and over again at the thought of  _ family;  _ he has wept ballads into rivers, composed sonnets from the bottom of liquor bottles, screamed entire operas of his magnificent anger into the unlistening world, all over the thought of family. 

For centuries, the word scared him shitless.

But here, Nile Freeman holds his hands and offers the word back to him with no malice, no expectation other than the hope of sharing her happiness with him.

And it doesn’t feel like it costs anything at all for him to smile back at her. For him to lean down, curve his neck and make himself vulnerable as he folds over her hands and kisses each knuckle. 

“It does,” he agrees, coming back up slowly. “It feels like family.”

She’s crying when he faces her again, and that twists him up fiercely. He said the wrong thing. He must have. Nile Freeman doesn’t just  _ cry.  _ He’s seen her take a grenade to the gut and shoot fifteen people before her intestines fully grew back without even tearing up; the only time he's seen her truly, really cry was when her brother died, and when they thought Nicky had died.

“Are you sad?” He murmurs, somehow knowing that it wouldn’t negate her happiness if she were. 

Nile shakes her head though, and there’s a faint tinge of relief to his thoughts. He waits for her to explain, and she does when her breathing slows again.

“I’m … wondering to see what I’ll dream about now,” Nile confesses quietly, the distant sound of the ocean whispering through their window in their ramshackle house on the Spanish coast. An echo neither of them has been able to escape for unbearable years. “Interested, I guess.”

Booker hums. “What do you think you’ll dream of?”

“I don’t know.” Nile laughs, a sweet, wet sound that Booker tucks away to treasure among the rest of her laughs that he’s collected over the years, the laughter that now outweighs the flask he packed away last year. “The last vacation me and my family ever took before I was deployed. Drove all the way up to Mackinac.” He nods as though he knows what that means, only the vague shape of an island barely touched by time crossing his mind. 

“Or … or maybe my brother,” Nile whispers, sad for a moment in her happiness. She clears her throat. “Hmm … the gelato you and I split in Venice ten years ago.”

Booker could cry at the thought; he wonders if Nile knows that was the moment he realized he loved her, loved her in a way completely different to the way he loved Andy and Joe, loved her and her scrunched-up nose and perfect chin that had been covered in smears of gelato, loved her in the painful way that promised grief and scared him shitless the second he knew. Loved her in a way that’s  _ actually  _ only ever made him happy since he realized it. 

Through all of that, he only smiles at her, his thumbs stroking over her knuckles again.

“What will you dream of?” Nile asks.

“Hm?” Booker doesn’t pause in the tender movement. “I don’t think I will dream.”

“Oh no?” She’s almost laughing, probably about to tease him about dreaming of miserable black and white films, or of bitter existentialist theory.

“No.” Booker lets himself look at her. “I don’t need to; but if I did, I think it would look something like this.”

Nile’s eyes are luminous even in the pitch-darkness of their room. Something swells between them, and it isn’t broken in the slightest when she whispers, a little breathlessly, “Sebastien le Livre. You set me up.”

“Absolument, mon chou.”

She slides towards him fully, and he guides her with a soft hand between her shoulder blades; Nile tucks her head under his chin and folds a leg between his, and he presses a kiss into her hair, near her ear, and closes his eyes.

They sleep like that; and in the morning, Booker will tell her that he was absolutely right. 

There’s nothing he can dream of that’s better than Nile Freeman.

* * *

Down the hall, Andromache and Quynh are much quieter than the younger immortals. Andromache can’t stop touching her; Quynh basks in the light touches brushed over her cheeks and forehead, shaking a little when she can hear tears slip from Andromache’s sharp jaw.

They marvel quietly at each other’s heartbeats, and Quynh whispers, once, “I was so scared -- that I would come back, and it would … it would be like Lykon. It was a different sort of insanity to think that -- that I would be too late--”

“It will never be too late for us,” Andromache swears to her, pressing a palm to her chest and resting their foreheads together. “I have loved you since the beginning; I will love you until the end.”

“Until the end,” Quynh echoes, shadows in her eyes that might take another few millennia to fully sort out. 

Andromache thinks of battles won and spoils collected and wicked men slaughtered and thinks none of it tastes as sweet as this, the quietness of them both, old as fuck --  _ older than fuck,  _ she corrects wryly -- and so fucking tired, but here, together. They are powerful, and ancient, and so, so weary, and yet she doesn’t think there’s ever been a single thing as precious as Quynh, as deserving (and unneeding) of protection, of reverence. 

This is all she’ll ever need; her family whole, intact (growing, impossibly,  _ growing _ ), and Quynh in her arms. She doesn’t need anything else.

Quynh is humming softly as Andromache strokes long fingers through her thick, perfect hair, and she doesn’t even crack an eye when she says, “if we don’t get to fuck tonight, I  _ am  _ going to stab someone. And honestly, my money’s on the Frenchman.”

Andromache absolutely cackles into their kiss.

* * *

“Nicky, I…” Yusuf’s been fumbling for the right thing to say since they got into the privacy of the bedroom. “Nicolo. … N-...” He presses his lips together, and his expression crumbles.

That won’t do. 

Nicky guides Yusuf to the bed and eases him down so they’re both sitting on the edge of the mattress; he stubbornly anchors their fingers together even though he isn’t sure if it’s the wisest move right now considering Yusuf thought he was dead only three hours ago.

Yusuf’s fingers tighten around his spasmodically, and Nicky thinks it might be the right thing to do after all when Yusuf’s head droops to his shoulder, one hand leaving Nicky’s to grip his neck, his other shoulder, his arm, as he weeps into the thin t-shirt he wears.

“I don’t know what to say,” Yusuf chokes out. “Nicolo,  _ Nicky  _ \- I’ve … I’ve never let myself think about this, not since…” He coughs and sits up, releasing Nicky to bury his face in his hands with staggering breaths. 

The poet, the famed al-Kaysani, lost for words. Nicky isn’t sure what to do with that. 

He touches Yusuf’s elbow. “I am sorry for not coming back sooner,” he says earnestly. “I was … I was so confused. I was not sure if you would even … want to see me.”

“How?” Yusuf demands, looking up to frown at him, incredulity written into his handsome features. He looks impossibly younger with his beard gone. “How could I not want to -- how could you think I wouldn’t  _ rejoice  _ at the sight of you--”

“This is rejoicing?” Nicky asks mildly. He doesn’t mean for it to land in a cruel way, but Yusuf flinches painfully away from him, hiding his face again. Nicky stares at his feet and mulls his thoughts over. 

“I didn’t know where you were,” he says, and Yusuf stills, clearly hanging onto his every word. “When I … when I woke up. There were so many bodies, and I…” He shakes his head at Yusuf, who sits up and reaches for him imploringly, mouth open to say something, doubtlessly an apology. “I am glad you ran, Yusuf. Truly. You need to be free.”

Yusuf clearly still has some doubts, but he closes his mouth and nods, reaching for Nicky’s hand again; he presses it to his jaw and kisses the heel of his palm, eyes fluttering shut when Nicky turns towards him more and uses his free hand to stroke the curls over his ear.

“I was so confused. More scared than I’d ever been -- I didn’t have my phone. I know Nile took it, destroyed it,” he hastens to explain when Yusuf looks at him plaintively again, “and I know you all abandoned your phones, your numbers when you left DC. I don’t blame you for leaving me there, Yusuf. It simply does not change how confused and … and hurt I was.”

“Because I lied,” Yusuf whispers, agony in his voice. “Nicky--”

“You used to call me Nicolo,” he says, pulling away to stare at his feet again. Yusuf sniffs a little, and Nicky takes the hand that reaches out to him. 

“And you used to call me Joe,” Yusuf counters.

“Joe wasn’t real,” Nicky points out, and Yusuf wilts further. “Yusuf is. Or, maybe you  _ both  _ are. Maybe you are both. It’s - it’s confusing to think about. As is the fact that I know why you lied, and I understand it perfectly, but I still am so ….” He shakes his head and huffs a laugh. “Confused.”

“You need time,” Yusuf fills in for him, his voice tight but accepting, his fingers looser on Nicky’s. “You need me to give you space, to sort it out--”

“No!” Nicky almost shouts it, turning to face Yusuf wildly. “No, Yusuf, I - in the last months all I’ve wanted is to talk to you. About this - this  _ thing  _ that’s happened to us, about what to do, how to fill time when time doesn’t end. Beyond that, I’ve just … I’ve missed you so badly that it hurt worse than a fucking bullet, and trust me when I say that I  _ hate  _ that I know what that metaphor really means-”

Yusuf looks about ready to cry again, so Nicky calms down and gathers his hands up again. “Yusuf,” he whispers, “Yusuf, I missed you. Don’t … don’t give me time and space that I don’t need. I trust you to … help me figure it out. I want you to.”

He nods, and they lean together so their foreheads touch; Nicky breathes slowly and eventually Yusuf does too, but both of them are most of the way to full tears at this point.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t demand Quynh tell me where you were,” Nicky continues, looping back to his first apology. “I did need time then, but also … I was scared that I would hurt you by coming back, that I would be imposing on your … your  _ eternity  _ if I showed up and--”

“Stop.” Yusuf’s fingers tremble when he touches Nicky’s cheek. “Stop, I beg of you. How could you think that of me?”

“You’re a thousand years old,” Nicky points out, weakly. “A fact I only learned under extreme stress. And I’m … me. I’m a little speck of that time; we were only a tiny fragment of your time.”

“It was so easy for you to leave me,” he continues, unaware of how still Yusuf is now. “You walked away so easily, and I almost shattered -- we’ve been apart for almost as long as we were together. I thought that maybe you would get over--”

“Get over,” Yusuf scoffs, interrupting him. His voice is sharp with anger. “Finish that sentence, Nicolo. Go on. Tell me how easy it would be for me to get over holding you in my arms, broken and bleeding and  _ dead  _ from my mistakes -- tell me how little you think of me!”

“I don’t think little of you,” Nicky argues, cross and tired and frustrated. “I think the world of you, Yusuf--”

“Is it impossible to believe that it is the same for me? That my centuries had blurred together, lost all meaning, and it was you who broke through that darkness? That monotony?” Yusuf slides his fingers through Nicky’s hair, nails scraping slightly at his scalp. 

He leans into the touch like a starving cat.

“I could never forget the brilliance of your soul,” Yusuf says to him, as solemn as any vow. “I would have spent the rest of my years trying to find the light of your smile, the poetry of your voice, in anything this world could offer me, searching for whatever shade of happiness I could have found without you.”

Nicky laughs wetly, still leaning into Yusuf’s touch. “You say things like this, and it’s hard for me to remember that we broke up--”

Yusuf makes a strangled noise and begins to pull away, which is ultimately  _ not  _ something Nicky wants. “You -- you wish to remain -- that is -- of course, I will respect your--”

“Yusuf.” He reaches out this time, frames his jaw in his hands, strokes a thumb over his perfect cheekbone. “Hayati.” His eyes flutter shut, and Nicky smiles at his beauty, even as his heart trembles with the weight of the last year. “I never want to be apart from you again.”

“I love you,” one of them murmurs, or maybe both; it blurs together because they’re kissing, and Nicky’s chest feels fuller than he can ever recall. 

It’s because there’s nothing hiding between them anymore -- no need to hide his anxieties or insecurities, no pretense that he can sense around Yusuf, no walls or lies or carefully constructed identities. Now, they’re just Nicky and Joe, Yusuf and Nicolo. Their kiss tastes like freedom for it.

Eventually, it gentles and they ease down onto the mattress, on top of the covers. They’re contentedly warmed by each other’s embrace, and they stroke each other’s hair, noses brushing together, as they whisper reassurances to each other. Eventually, they quiet, and all they can hear is the ocean, and the other’s heartbeat, and all of the infinities that exist inside both.

“We can talk more in the morning,” Nicky offers when he sees the circles under Yusuf’s eyes; he traces a gentle finger around one, causing his beloved’s lashes to flutter. “We’re both exhausted.”

“I can’t sleep,” Yusuf whispers, his eyes still shut. “What if this is a dream?”

Nicky’s heart twists painfully to hear that vulnerability laid bare. “I’ll be here in the morning,” he assures him, slipping his leg between Joe’s to get closer. He kisses his chin, then his nose. “I won’t leave, Yusuf.”

He shakes his head slowly. “You were dead.” His hands move although his eyes remain closed, and Joe’s trembling fingers trace over the back of Nicky’s scalp. He whispers, again, “You were  _ dead _ .”

“I was,” Nicky agrees, wrapping his fingers around Joe’s forearm, not pulling him away, only trying to hold him. “And now I am not. That won’t change in the morning.”

“I have nightmares.” Yusuf’s voice cracks. “Every night. Nico -- I dream of you, and how you stared through me … I dream that I’m holding your skull together in my hands,” he sobs fully now, “and it’s the o-only thing keeping you alive, and I  _ always  _ fail. You, you, y-you bleed out in my arms e-every time.” 

Nicky kisses the tears that slip out from Yusuf’s clenched eyes, whispering to him in Italian, his nose bumping against his nose, his chin, his temple. “You did not fail me then,” he whispers to Yusuf, “you will never fail me. It was meant to happen in that way--”

Yusuf grumbles a protest, but Nicky kisses him. Against his lips he whispers, “And now I am here. I will still be here in the morning. I swear this to you.”

At last, brown eyes open to stare into his, and Nicky sits back a little so he can let Joe see the lack of fear in his eyes, the exhaustion, the complete adoration he still has for him, even through the muddle of confused emotions still at war within him.

Loving Yusuf al-Kaysani is pretty much the  _ only  _ thing that Nicky fully believes as true, these days.

“Here,” he whispers, kissing Yusuf one last, sweet, lingering time, before turning over awkwardly on the bed. “Hold me.”

Without hesitation, Yusuf’s arms wrap around him, his chest plastered to Nicky’s back, his hand tight around Nicky’s forearm. There are less awkward ways to sleep, but Nicky likes the way he can feel Yusuf’s heart pound through his chest, likes the way they touch from shoulder to ankles. 

Nicky uses his feet to try and kick the quilt up over them; with a small laugh, Yusuf bends to gather the material and pull it up, draping it over them before returning to his embrace. 

“If you have a nightmare,” Nicky whispers to the wall when they’re settled again, “you can wake me up, but … but hopefully you’ll realize that--”

“You’re here,” Yusuf finishes, delicate fingers tracing something along his scalp, sliding through the shaggy hair. He presses a kiss to the back of Nicky’s head, and then his neck before pressing his nose against the top of Nicky’s spine. “You’re whole, and here, and alive.”

“Exactly.” Nicky smiles and presses back against Yusuf. “And I love you.”

“And you love me.” Yusuf kisses him lightly on the back of the jaw before brushing his nose under Nicky’s ear. “As I love you.”

_ Everything will work out _ , Nicky thinks as he drifts off to sleep, feeling safer than he has in a year with Yusuf’s arms around him.  _ Because we love each other. _

* * *

Andy and Quynh leave first.

“We’re going on a sex vacation,” Quynh tells Nicky with a gleam in her eye as they pull away from their embrace. “And we’re going to hunt down serial killers!”

“At … the same time?” Nile asks slowly, spoon paused where it’s about to deliver Frosted Flakes to Booker’s mouth.

Joe snorts at their newfound domesticity and gives Andy a thumbs up from his perch on the back of the sofa. “Have fun, boss.”

“We will.” Andy gives Nicky a hug as well and then creeps up behind Booker, her pack slung over her shoulder as she wraps her arms around him in a surprise hug. 

“Ahh!” Booker gives a very genuine startle and then grunts a laugh, patting Andy’s wiry forearm. “Remember when you were grumpy as shit all the time? I sort of miss it.”

With intense dignity, Andy pops her index finger in her mouth and wet willies him in response.

She and Quynh are gone fifteen minutes later, hand-in-hand and gloriously happy.

* * *

The four of them head to Malta a few weeks later.

Joe’s no longer waking up in the middle of the night, screaming for a dead man; instead, he wakes up every morning to lazy kisses and sweet smiles. They talk most days, trading stories -- most of which come from Joe, unburdened now by the heavy secret of his past.

Nile and Booker find lodging up in Valletta, and Joe and Nicky camp out on the couch in their suite for a few days, but their respective needs for privacy blossom past the comfort levels born of multi-century familiarity between Booker and Joe, and so they come to an unspoken agreement that Nicky and Joe should find their own place to spend their nights.

They decide to go towards St. Peter’s Pool, the name intriguing Nicky as they examine a map in the luxurious sunshine, both of them wearing nerdy sunglasses and loose shirts and too wrapped up in each other to care about particular destinations.

After renting a rattling car, they drive half an hour from the capita to a beautiful little house overlooking the sea that Booker finds with shocking ease, using money that never seems to run out thanks to their many years of careful investments (and more than a few pillagings because it’s actually  _ pretty damn  _ likely that wicked men have money to steal after the team ruins their lives).

Nothing much happens the first night. They spend an hour or two walking around the nearby town, marking on the map the hiking trails and mini-destinations they’ll want to go to, but they collect some food from a market and head back to the house.

Joe’s dizzy with happiness as they spin each other around the living area, the doors thrown wide open and dragging in warm, humid air. Joe can’t stop laughing as Nicky spins him, both of them stumbling over a small ottoman, and they only stop dancing to settle in at the tiny table near the north side of the house. 

Nicky feeds him bites of bread and cheese with their legs tangled together, wrists and foreheads pressing together more often than not as they eat and smile and eat some more until Joe’s entire jaw aches with it, a soothing sort of permanence that doesn’t fade because he simply doesn’t stop smiling, doesn’t have to give his muscles time to heal.

By the time they’ve switched to grapes and olives, they’re making a bit of a mess, and Nicky unbuttons his shirt first, leaving it open and loose around his chest and flat stomach; his fingers are slightly sticky as he unbuttons Joe’s shirt too, after Joe climbs into his lap, both of them laughing when the woven seat of the chair groans a little in protest at the doubled weight. And they kiss like that, hazy and slow, tasting their shared dinner on each other’s lips and tongues, Nicky’s thumbs digging a little into Joe’s thighs, the right edge of pressure that grounds him and reminds him that this is all blessedly real.

Joe smiles the whole time, Nicky’s face warm and soft with his own happiness in Joe’s hands.

* * *

Three weeks into their stay, only two months after Nicky came back to Joe, they end up at the water on a private stretch of beach.

They’ve been to the Pool by now, and walked along paths that wind down the coast, but Nicky’s feeling especially brave today. He swallows harshly when he steps out into the blinding sun, and walks down to the waterline where he can see Joe already standing in the surf, his upper half bare and skin practically glowing in the sun.

Nicky’s chest twists up in love, like it always does, but also in fear as he approaches the waves tumbling towards Joe, that sweep up over his ankles. 

His heart’s racing as he stops just short of the damp line in the sand, wondering if he’s imagining being able to only hear the pound of it in his ears over the noise of the sea, the distant calling of birds, all of the sounds that surround them and prove to him that he is not trapped under the water he’s staring at.

Joe turns and sees him there, a smile on his lips that’s quickly lost to concern. “Nicolo-”

“I’ll be right there,” Nicky says, holding a hand up to signal to Joe to wait, because Joe’s already walking towards him. “Here. I’ll… I’m going to come to you. Give me a moment.”

“I’ll give you all the moments you need, tesoro.”

Joe looks back out on the waves, clearly sensing that Nicky wants to do this on his own (needs to), and Nicky watches the foaming of the tides as it surges up near his sand-covered toes. He takes a deep breath, fingers tapping a nervous rhythm on his lower stomach, bared to the sun due to his unbuttoned shirt (and thank  _ God  _ he cannot get sunburned anymore, Jesus, he will no longer look like a lobster ever again, who knew it would take dying to get him out in the sunlight more, now that he doesn’t even need Vitamin D and is probably immune to scurvy …  _ maybe _ ).

He closes his eyes and listens to the sea. He hears inside of it the cruelty that trapped Quynh; he hears the impassive way it took his parents; he can hear the air leaving his own lungs as he drifted further beneath the surface, the way his ears popped and his chest seared in pain -- he can smell the salt and taste bile in his mouth. 

The sea took a lot away from him, and from their little, strange, immortal family. It’s also the sea that Yusuf knew a millennium ago; it’s the sea that lulls him to sleep each night with Joe’s chest pressed to his back. The sea is a lot of things, much like his new life is, and Nicky is partially relieved to find that despite his sudden imperviousness to death, he still feels absolutely tiny against the sheer  _ bigness  _ of the water.

It swallowed him whole and spat him out years ago; he hasn’t touched it since. Came close to it in Maine; never quite touching it but letting it brush up against his life while he untangled all the death that had suddenly swarmed him.

And now it’s here, and so is he.

Nicky opens his eyes and sees Yusuf still standing in the surf, dark hair slicked down along his firm calves where the foam licks at him as it rushes past. Nicky smiles and walks into the water, aiming for the only place he’s sure he belongs anymore:

He takes Joe’s hand, and he feels Joe look at him with warmth to rival the sun overhead. Joe doesn’t say anything silly like  _ I’m so proud of you,  _ but he squeezes Nicky’s hand firmly and Nicky knows he’s proud of him all the same. It burns a little in his chest, but he makes himself breathe through it anyway.

The water tugs at him as it rushes back out, an unsettling sucking feeling that threatens to pull him over; but Nicky plants his feet more staunchly in the sand and refuses to go with it. He remains.

That’s precisely it, he realizes in the bright warmth of Malta, knee-deep in the thing that’s tried so hard to kill him:

Nicolo Genova remains, no matter what else happens, no matter what the world tries to fling at him. 

Despite everything, he remains.

(For the first time, Nicky thinks he might actually be able to live with that)

* * *

They tumble back inside, laughing, when an unexpected storm sweeps up the coast; the dark clouds are mostly out to sea, but enough have creeped inland to the point where they’re pelted with rain before they duck back into their rented home.

Joe slams the door shut, and they use stacked towels to dry themselves and each other off, laughing still as they rub rough cotton over each others arms and chests, Joe hauling him in a little as rain begins to strike the windows, pulling him in for a deep kiss.

“I know you had a big day,” he murmurs in the limited space between their mouths. “But  _ Nicolo,  _ those shorts on you--”

He groans and touches the skimpy material that clings to Nicky’s hips, and Nicky grins, forgetting to be bashful.

“These old things?” He practically purrs, smoothing his fingers over the back of Joe’s hand and pressing against him until his palm lies flat to the jut of his hipbone. “I wore them for you.”

“They should be illegal,” Joe swears, curling his fingers into the shamefully short hem. “You’re so beautiful.”

Lust flickers as a ball of heat in Nicky’s stomach, but it’s tempered by the sweet smile that stretches across his face. He touches Joe’s cheek gently, marveling at the beard that’s growing back, thick and full as ever. “You’re beautiful,” he echoes, and their next kiss is sweet and slow.

The one after is less so, and Nicky tugs Joe by the hands to the little bedroom that sits to the edge of the open living space. He pulls his shirt off on the way there, and is pleased when Joe’s warm hands run the length of his ribcage, drawing a slight giggle at the tickle of it; he’s well aware of how obviously hard he is in these tiny shorts, but Joe rocks against him with a low groan when they stand at the foot of the bed and Nicky realizes how hard he is, too.

They rut against each other, still standing up, the drag of heated skin so deliriously good even through their soaking wet layers. Joe’s fingers curl into Nicky’s shoulders, and Nicky abandons Joe’s mouth -- an egregiously monumental task -- to press kisses along the length of his neck. Joe rolls his head back and moans, a sweet high-pitched noise that has Nicky’s hips jolting forward, increasing the drag of their cocks together.

“You’re my light, and my life, and my heart,” Joe murmurs to him, and Nicky bites down, just a little, on the pulse point of his neck, dragging another delicious moan from Joe’s throat, “and  _ \-- fuck --  _ I’m going to love you forever, I swear--”

_ It’s the same for me,  _ Nicky thinks as he kisses Joe again, full and real, pushing Joe’s shirt off so it lands on the ground and leaves him bare-chested under his roaming hands.

“That sounds like a marriage proposal,” he says aloud, meaning for it to be teasing, but the words catching in his throat because in the middle of it, he realizes _how badly_ _he wants it to be true._

“Yes, I know.” Joe laughs a little, shy and sweet, not meeting Nicky’s eyes.

Nicky pulls his hands away and swallows, a dry, harsh thing. “That’s not funny, Yusuf,” he tells him hoarsely, fighting back the unexpected tears. At last, Joe meets his eyes, something burning in his expression. “It’s not funny to joke like that.”

Joe inhales, sharply, his shoulders a little tense; when he exhales, the tension loosens a little, and he gestures at the bag that’s near the bed, mostly packed and ready in case they ever have to leave quickly.

“The fourth compartment,” he says softly. “On the left side of the bag. Unzip it.”

Nicky frowns at him, his heartbeat loud in his ears -- his body’s put it together faster than his brain can, or at least his heart has. He moves, shaking a little, to kneel in front of the bag, and he counts compartments on the side of Joe’s pack.

“Other left,” Yusuf jokes, and Nicky tries to glare at him and fails, remembering the day the met and how he’d been too nervous to remember directions then, too. 

Nicky finds the compartment on the correct side and unzips it; he stares at the contents for a solid ten seconds before fishing them out:

Two rings. Silver and simple, shining in his palm.

“I was going to try and find a way to convince you to take a chance on forever with me,” Joe says, his beautiful voice still musical through the nervous cracks in it. Nicky stands slowly, his eyes going between the rings in his palm and Joe’s face. “I know … I have a lot to do to catch up, and the rings aren’t there to pressure you -- but I don’t want you to think I find the idea of forever a joke. I want you to know how serious I am, Nicolo Genova, because I stared down the barrel of forever  _ without you,  _ and I promise you that I mean it when I say that I really am going to love you for whatever years I have left -- and I want to spend them with you.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and Nicky looks at Yusuf al-Kaysani, the poet and scholar and warrior -- the man he loves so fiercely that it’s dug down into who he is as a person (and sometimes at night when he marvels at the permanence of Joe’s heartbeat, Nicky thinks that maybe it was his love for this man that tied him to the world in a way that not even a bullet could shred).

“I can’t make speeches like you,” Nicky says after a long moment, and Joe doesn’t even blink when Nicky crosses the limited space between them to take his hand. “I’m not … I’m not a poet.” He laughs nervously. “I told you that the day we met.”

“I really think--”

“Let me?” 

Joe nods bashfully and smiles at him, and both of their hands are shaking a little.

“I’m not a poet, but … I fell in love with you when I read that poem. Before I knew it was you. And I fell in love with Joe Jones, who I know now really  _ is  _ you as well. I saw your soul, Yusuf, I saw it in your words, and I loved it, and I saw it in who you’ve become, and I loved it then, too.” He takes one ring and slides it on Joe’s finger, listening to the way breath tumbles in and out of Joe’s lips, a holy echo to the tide.

“I don’t need to wait to figure it out. I don’t need you to make a perfect speech, or to - to convince me of it. Your soul already has.” Nicky smiles at him through the dampness gathered on his eyelashes. “Forever. That’s what I want with you.”

Joe laughs, wondrous and bright and relieved, a huff of noise that escapes him as he stares into Nicky’s eyes. “Are we making this official? Going to a courthouse? Because we’re actually in one of the few places in Europe where this actually won’t be much of a problem -- I’m sure Booker can fake our documents, and--”

It’s Nicky’s turn to laugh, and Joe slows to a stop, a smile playing at his lips. “There isn’t a court in the world that could understand how much I love you,” Nicky explains. 

“It’s the same for me,” Yusuf murmurs. He takes the second ring from Nicky’s palm and slips it onto Nicky’s ring finger. 

“Although,” Nicky hums thoughtfully as they wrap their arms around each other, both of them smiling widely. “I suppose I  _ could  _ marry us. I certainly know the vows, and it’s not like the Church would really approve of this even if I  _ weren’t  _ doubling as the officiant.”

“Vows sound nice,” Joe says, leaning in to kiss Nicky. “I vow to tell Nicolo Genova how beautiful he is, every day for the rest of our very long lives--”

“And I vow to tell Yusuf al-Kaysani how wonderful he is, every day for the rest of our very long lives--”

They both lean in to kiss each other around the fifth promise to eternally love and respect each other, and it doesn’t take long at all after that for them to end up on the bed, naked and shivering with happiness.

Joe shows Nicky how to touch him, encouraging him with high-pitched gasps and soft grunts as Nicky works an oiled finger into his ass. With some very specific directions ( _ do not think about how specific,  _ he tells a very small, easily dismissed voice of jealousy in the back of his mind), Nicky finds a small bump inside Joe that has him keening and arching off the bed when he strokes his finger back and forth over it, applying pressure and changing speed at Joe’s gentle suggestions. 

“Another,” Yusuf begs, gripping Nicky’s hand, and  _ fuck,  _ he’s hard to the point of leaking as he fists his own cock while pushing two fingers into the heated ring of flesh. 

Nicky wants to do everything and more as Joe writhes against the sheets, but as he kisses the jumping muscles of Joe’s lower stomach, coming close to the weeping head of his cock -- fingers still thrusting inside him -- Joe moans a little and tugs at Nicky’s hair.

“No,” he pants, and Nicky stops all the way, intensely panicked that he hurt Joe in his enthusiasm. “No,  _ fuck,  _ don’t stop--” he resumes fucking his fingers into Joe, “I only mean -- I want you to fuck me, Nicolo, that’s all I want--”

Nicky swallows around a litany of curses, and with Joe’s deft fingers wrapped around his cock, smearing oil and precome around with a liberal generosity, he almost comes himself, nearly biting his tongue in half to stop from moaning something obscene.

He replaces his fingers with the head of his cock, pushing lightly at the tight entrance that flutters against him; Nicky’s eyes flutter as Joe’s slippery fingers paw at his stomach. They work together to get Joe adjusted, propping a pillow under his hips, and Joe tugs at his own cock while Nicky finally pushes inside, only an agonizing inch at first.

There’s heat that threatens to swallow him, and Nicky feels a tear slip down his cheek. Joe doesn’t look much better, his eyes glassy and curls damp. 

“I love you,” Nicky says, pretty much reduced to that and  _ Yusuf  _ and  _ yes  _ and  _ Joe  _ and  _ please. _

Joe pulls him in, his body relaxing around him while still gripping him, and Nicky manages to kiss him, his hands curled up in the sheets while his hips stutter out a rhythm that he slowly grows accustomed to, an instinct he didn’t know he had. 

He babbles a few more things about how Joe’s ass is perfect, how Joe is perfect, how he really is going to love Yusuf forever, and Joe is kind enough to not laugh at him; Nicky comes, choking on the rush of sensation, a minute or so after Yusuf tilts his hips up deliciously and digs his nails into the meat of Nicky’s ass.

Nicky somehow manages to not collapse on top of Yusuf (his husband, he thinks dizzily, he really is his husband, and they definitely consummated their marriage, a fact that makes him want to cry again), and instead strokes Yusuf’s cock and murmurs to him promises of forever until Yusuf arches off the bed and comes with a slow gasp of  _ Nicolo. _

They’re both panting a little, Nicky blinking past tears in his eyes, as they settle onto the pillows a bit more; it’s still raining outside, but it’s dulled to a faint drizzle that’s barely discernible over their heavy breathing.

“I love you,” Nicky says, his mouth a little dry.

“Love you,” Joe murmurs, rolling over onto his stomach to kiss him, both of them not caring in the least about the mess of fluids between them and gathered on the sheets.

The kiss is unhurried, but Joe’s tongue against his feels as divine as ever, and Nicky startles when he realizes that his cock is already hard, firm and heated against his thigh.

“Shit,” he laughs, pulling away from the kiss to stare down at himself. “Oh, wow, that’s -- that’s new.”

Yusuf’s cock is hard too, he notices with a thrill, and his eyes are warm and dark with the promise of further lovemaking (a word that would have made Nicky roll his eyes two years ago, a word that he thinks he understands now).

“Maybe I should have mentioned,” Yusuf drawls, dropping his head to the pillows to smirk up at Nicolo. “You don’t have a refractory period anymore.”

“You should have started with that,” Nicky teases.

Joe laughs, bright and warm, and then he winks at Nicky, sexy and charming as hell. “Round two?”

Nicky nods and fumbles for the nightstand, not really moving, relying on memory to find the bottle of lube. He grabs it and manages to toss it at Joe, who catches it with an unnerving skill.

Then, he smiles as coquettishly as he can manage. “You made it look so fun,” Nicky whispers, letting himself feel the full shyness, but also the full desire of his request. “...I want to try.”

Joe moans and hoists himself up to kiss Nicky, and then his shoulder, and then the knobs of his spine. Nicky jolts and yelps a little when Joe bites at his ass playfully, but it changes to a moan a second later when Joe’s tongue finds the sensitive skin between his balls and his hole, and licks away the salt there, and --

Years later, Nicky will think that he really, really likes Malta.

* * *

Nicolo cooks in the cramped kitchen in a safehouse near Mexico City. 

In the living room, Joe and Nile are getting destroyed by Quynh in a card game, and Andy is sprawled out on the couch, sleeping. Booker walks in from the other room, where he’s been talking with Copley (who had screamed and fainted when he accidentally ran into Nicolo in Italy last year, and that is something that Yusuf  _ swears  _ he did not find hilarious and totally earned, even though Booker  _ knows  _ that Yusuf had Nile send him the video of it).

“We got a job,” he informs the group.

Andy sits up slowly, looking as though she hadn’t just been dozing and muttering something about baklava in her sleep; Nile and Joe look up with interest, even as Quynh continues to count the Ritz crackers she’d won from them in the last hand.

“South America, corrupt politician exploiting the drug crisis between a few countries, and now he’s getting kids involved in the worst way.” Booker settles on the couch at Andy’s feet and glances into the kitchen, where Nicky’s listening while chopping garlic. “Big gala coming up with a lot of fancy diplomats. Copley seems to think we’ll be able to get more info from conversation than any kind of virtual theft or a smash-and-grab. But we  _ do  _ need someone who knows how that world works.”

It’s been five years since DC, but Joe’s eyes still darken with concern when he glances to his husband at the counter.

“I can go to a gala,” Quynh mutters, taking a swig of wine. “I look great in a dress, and Andromache  _ kills  _ in a suit.”

“Copley seems to think that would be a literal compliment,” Booker says, smiling at the way Quynh shrugs in full acceptance and goes back to counting her winnings.

“I think we know some people who could manage not to stab anyone,” Nile says slowly. “I could probably get through an evening with a bunch of fancy idiots, but …. Wouldn’t hurt to have back-up.”

Nicky stops chopping and looks right at Joe, who hasn’t spoken up since Booker entered the room. The conversation that passes between them is silent, infinite -- as if they’ve known each other for a thousand years and not merely a handful. 

_ It’s the right thing to do,  _ Nicky tells Joe, who knows this is the truth.

_ I know, but you don’t have to do it,  _ Joe answers, worry and love written all over his face.

Nicky tilts his head a little with a rueful smile.  _ If we do not do this, then who will?  _

Joe doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t have to: Nicky knows he supports his decision, as long as it’s fully his decision.

Joe looks back at his new hand of cards; Nicky looks at Booker with half a smile. 

“I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoooooo boy I am weirdly emotional about this fic ending, considering it's only really been a WIP for a little over a month. I really love these boys, and I love you all for being so responsive and supportive and kind <3 <3 <3
> 
> I'd love to write more in this 'verse one day, either as bonus chapters/further epilogues/side fics about any moments/anything you might want to see, but I'm happy to put the bookmark in their story for right now and just say thank you, thank you so much for your encouragement and support and I really hope you liked this fic <3

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading so far, xoxo


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